Anne Spencer beyond the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract: Anne Spencer has long been considered one of the most perplexing and hard-to-categorize figures of African American poetry. How is she both unconventional and representative? Spencer has been called both politically engaged and reclusive—someone who rarely socialized, yet whose door was always open to visiting race leaders. By applying abstract modifiers such as "unique"—or relegating her writing to the period of her youth—critics for decades have struggled to position and fairly assess Spencer's poetry. Has the delimiting Harlem Renaissance association prevented full recognition of the complete and complex scope of Spencer's influence and significance? This essay proposes a fresh and transhistorical context for Spencer that conjoins sex and race—the areas that critics often feel she avoids. In firm disagreement, this article analyzes the complex stylistics that makes her poems so challenging to describe and categorize to reveal the social and political engagement at the heart of her poetic œuvre. A socially committed poet throughout her life, Spencer's dialogues with poets of varied ages and eras place her in a tradition of Black artists who use creative means as vehicles of protest to break down stereotypes of sex and race.