confesses the speaker, “and calm / Amid my own
heart’s dearth.”
JESSIE FAUSET’s review of The Heart of a
Womanappeared in the October 1919 issue of the
JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY. Fauset echoed
Braithwaite’s praise for the sincere poems, noting
that “In these days of vers libreand the deliberate
straining for poetic effect... We... are glad to re-
turn to the softer pipings of old time themes—
love, friendship, longing, despair.” Fauset predicted
that Johnson soon would be among “the best writ-
ers of the world” because of her single-minded at-
tention to articulating the human condition.
Fauset acknowledged that Johnson’s collection of
poems transcended race and concentrated instead
on “imagination that characterizes any literary per-
son choosing this field as a means of directing the
thought of the world.” She did make an effort,
however, to remind readers of Johnson’s accom-
plishments as a race writer. According to Fauset,
Johnson had proved herself capable of ably “por-
traying the trials and tribulations besetting a de-
spised and rejected people.”
Johnson would note many years later that The
Heart of a Womanwas “not at all race conscious”
and that some had concluded that she had “no feel-
ing for the race.” She took the criticism seriously
and produced BRONZE(1922), a collection of poems
that were entirely focused on matters of race.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. Black American Women Poets and Drama-
tists.New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996.
Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writ-
ers of the Harlem Renaissance.Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987.
Johnson, Georgia Douglas. The Selected Works of Georgia
Douglas Johnson.Edited by Claudia Tate. New York:
G. K. Hall, 1997.
Heart of the World and Other Poems
Henry Joshua Jones(1919)
The first published volume of poems by HENRY
JOSHUA JONES, a writer from South Carolina.
Jones was a poet and novelist who published his
second volume of poems, Poems of the Four Seas,in
1921 and BYSANCTION OFLAW,a novel on race
and family matters, in 1924. Heart of the Worldin-
cluded a variety of poems and showcased Jones’s
perspectives of pressing contemporary issues such
as LYNCHINGand threats to democracy.
The inspiration for the title of Jones’s collection
came from a 1918 speech by President Woodrow
Wilson. In a speech to the U.S. Senate during which
he presented the Treaty of Versailles and plans for
the formation of the League of Nations, Wilson
asked, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the
world?” The Senate answered yes: The effort to pass
the Versailles Treaty failed. Jones’s volume, pub-
lished soon after this landmark address by Wilson,
includes poems with military themes and endorses
the principles of democracy in a world on the brink
of a second world war.
NEWMANIVEYWHITEand WALTERCLINTON
JACKSON, editors of ANANTHOLOGY OFVERSEBY
AMERICANNEGROES(1924), consulted Heart of the
Worldas they prepared their anthology. Although
they chose not to include any of Jones’s poems in
the anthology, they did offer a brief critique of the
work. Their comments, which were not over-
whelmingly positive, noted that the book is a vol-
ume of “good commonplace verse” but that its
“main defect is lack of ability to rise above the com-
monplace in diction, emotion, and thought.”Bibliography
White, Newman Ivey, and Walter Clinton Jackson. An
Anthology of Verse by American Negroes.Durham,
N.C.: The Seaman Printery Incorporated, 1924.Help WantedJoseph Mitchell(1929)
A play by JOSEPHMITCHELL, an Alabama-born
lawyer and playwright who resided in BOSTONdur-
ing the Harlem Renaissance era.
Some scholars attribute the work to EULALIE
SPENCE, a pioneering dramatist who joined the
theater world first through her collaborations with
W. E. B. DUBOISand the KRIGWAPLAYERSin the
mid- to late 1920s. The play, whose byline identi-
fies Joseph Mitchell as its author, appeared in the
April 1929 issue of the Boston-based SATURDAY
EVENINGQUILL.The comprehensive bibliography
of African-American plays by Esther Arata and
Nicholas Rotoli attributes the work to Spence.
However, critics Lorraine Roses and Ruth Ran-
dolph characterize the piece as “pedestrian” and230 Heart of the World and Other Poems