Tyrus Miller is an assistant professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University, where he teaches twentieth-century literature and visual culture. His book Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars is forthcoming. In the following essay, Miller discusses the various functions of the poem, such as to memorialize Baraka's life and death, to reflect on the loss of one's innocence and the realization that such innocence might be a kind of blindness, and to reveal the morality associated with the concepts of color and race.

"In Memory of Radio" dates from the late 1950s and appeared in a book entitled Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note ..., the first collection of poems by the African-American writer Le Roi Jones (now named Amiri Baraka). Spanning the end of the radio age and the emergence of television, Jones's poem is a lament for the...