Melvin Beaunorus Tolson is an African-American modernist poet, educator, columnist, and playwright whose work focuses on the experiences of African Americans and includes several poetic stories. He lived during the Renaissance of Harlem and, although he was not a participant, his work reflects his influence.
Tolson at Columbia University from 1931 to 1932 on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship put him in Harlem at the end of the Harlem Renaissance since he became friendly with many of the writers who were associated with him, primarily with Langston Hughes, and were inspired to develop your poetic talent.
Therefore, in many of his poems, Tolson redefined the atmosphere of Harlem in the 1930s. Inspired by the achievements of people like Hughes who were around him, Tolson decided to contribute to the proud legacy that black writers created.
His previous collection Rendezvous and Gallery reflects the early influence of Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Wright and Langston Hughes, which emphasize Tolson’s proletarian convictions and optimistic spirit. This later became apparent in his interest in the themes of black dignity, as in his exclusion of multiracial diversity in America ... This must have resulted in the West African Republic of Liberia declaring him the laureate of the poet in 1947.
Born in 1900 in Moberley, Missouri, Melvin Tolson was the son of a Methodist minister and an Afro-Greek mother, who was a seamstress. Thus, he was brought up in a Methodist episcopal home with his father the reverend, who taught classical languages. He traveled around the county small township with his parents among various churches in the state of Missouri and Iowa, until he finally settled in the Kansas City area. He lived in a house of contradictions. His father, who had education in the eighth grade, was skeptical about the cost of college, but he still inspired his son a strong desire for knowledge.
As a child, he loved to paint, but was forced to refuse the approval of his mother, a bohemian artist who wanted to take him with him to Paris. Therefore, turning to poetry, he found a suitable outlet for his work. At the age of 14, he had his first poem “The Wreck of the Titanic”, published in the local newspaper Oskaloosa, Iowa. Then in Kansas City in 1911, he became the elected senior poet.
He graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919 and entered Fisk University, but this year he was transferred to Lincoln University for financial reasons. There he met Ruth Southall and married her on January 29, 1922. Paulson graduated with honors in 1924, then moved to Marshall, Texas, to study speech and English at Wailey College.
While at Wiley, Tolson created a number of landmark extra-curricular activities, such as his junior university football team training, theater club direction, co-creation of the black South Korean South Dramatic and Speech Arts Association, and the Wiley Forensic Society organization, the award-winning controversial club who gained national reputation by breaking a color bar in the country and meeting with unforeseen success, since during their tour in 1935 they competed against the University of Southern California, in which Op and Winfrey - film Big debaters , based, released December 25, 2007 (even though they discuss Harvard in the film, not USC). The film is directed by Denzel Washington.
Tolson admonished many students at Wiley, encouraging them not only to be healthy, but always to defend their rights, although it was a rather controversial position to take over the south of the United States in the beginning and middle of the 20th century.
Since 1930, Tolson began to write poetry. He received leave to receive a master’s degree in comparative literature from Columbia University in 1930–31, but did not finish it until 1940, writing a dissertation on the Harlem Renaissance and writing his first book of poems Harlem Portrait Gallery, poems of which Art Quarterly, Modern Quarterly and Modern month.
In 1941, Dark Symphony , often considered his greatest work, winning first place in the national poetry competition of 1939, was published in Atlantic month , Dark Symphony compares and contrasts African-American and European-American history.
In 1944, Tolson published his first collection of poems, Rendezvous with America which includes Dark Symphony prepared at the request of the editor Atlantic month when moving to Dodd Mead. The book has quickly gone through three editions since 1944.
Washington tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, Cabbage and caviar in which he attacked the class claim and the lack of racial pride of the black middle class after he left his teaching position in Willy in the late 1940s.
Tolson began teaching at Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma, in 1947. He also served as a playwright and director of the Dust Bowl Theater. One of his students, Nathan Hare, a pioneer of black studies, later became the founder of the publishing house Black scientist
Another important work of his Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953). Written in the form of an epic poem, it is sometimes the most ambitious work of the poet. It was commissioned this year and completed in 1953 for the Liberian century 1956.
Eight-section Libretto for the Republic of Liberia notes the intersection of several scattered threads - a modernist style superimposed on the English pdarnuyu ode about the African political moment of the African-American artist. Although he has a Negro theme, this poem can be said about the human world. And this subject is not simply affirmed, it is embodied in a rich and complex language and is realized in terms of poetic imagination. This gives the original key to its value for alliance orientation. But this indicates that Tolson increases poetic ambitions with the help of such a long, complex and allusive in some places and filled with surrealistic dreams in others. Nevertheless, it remains nedochitannym poem Negro
This year, Liberia declared Tolson its laureate poet, who was allegedly recognized by the Liberian knighthood of the Order of the Star of Africa. The 1950s and 90s led to his great success. He won poems and honorary doctors. He then received a chair at the Tuskegee Institute. He received the award "Art and Letters" in literature of the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Literature. He also entered local politics and was elected mayor of Langston for four consecutive terms from 1954 to 1960.
In 1965, Tolson’s final work will appear in his life, a long poem Harlem gallery , was published. This latest poem consists of several sections, each of which begins with the letter of the Greek alphabet and concentrates on the study of African-American life. This is generally a radical departure from his first works.
In 1965, Tolson was appointed for a two-year term at the Tsukige Institute, where he was Avalon the Poet. But he did not live long enough to finish his term here. For he died in the middle of his assignment after undergoing an oncological operation in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
The poems he wrote in New York were published posthumously in 1979 Harlem Portrait Gallery in a combination of different styles, as well as a free verse. The racially diverse and culturally rich community represented in Harlem Portrait Gallery may be founded or intended for Marshall, Texas. His poems were characterized by their allusive, complex, modernist style and their long poetic sequences.
Tolson, a man of impressive intelligence, created poetry that was “funny, witty, humorous, Farsi, rough, cruel, bitter and funny,” as Karl Shapiro said about the Harlem Gallery. Langston Hughes called it “no different. Students honor and love him. Children from such cotton fields as he. Coconut punchers understand him ... He is a great talker. ” In New York, Tolson met such important figures as the literary critic and editor V.F. Calverton, who called him “a bright, bright writer who testifies to his best effects due to understatement, not overestimation, and who fixes in stanza or stanza that most of his contemporaries failed to capture on pages or volumes. ”
Tolson’s fearless attitude to disputes and his energetic defense of his religious and social views caused not only fire, but also an invitation to publish in Pittsburgh Courier.
poetry
Raise every voice and sing (1899)
God Trombone: Seven (1927)
Selected Poems (1936)
