Lift Every Voice and Sing: Selected Poems

Name: Lift Every Voice and Sing: Selected Poems
Brand: Penguin Classics
SKU: 8387X
Price: 17.10 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: James Weldon Johnson
ISBN: 9780141183879

By: James Weldon Johnson, Sondra Kathryn Wilson

Product Description

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Powerful poems of black life and achievement from a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance including his celebrated "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the African American National Anthem. James Weldon Johnson's name stirs up emotions which are contained only by tremendous control. His poetry is an exhortation to loose the bonds of dreary second-class citizenship and humiliating segregation and devastating racism. The lyrics bid the reader to be free, to walk with gratitude over ground red with the blood of our ancestors; encourages us to be free to bid the day good morning with hopeful heart, to adore the Creator with gladsome hearts for the battles won and to ask of that same Creator for strength for the battles yet to come. James Weldon Johnson aptly, deeply, with love and humor and a powerful rhyming tongue, has told our story and sung our song. Originally published as Saint Peter Relates a Incident.

Product Information

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Title: Lift Every Voice and Sing: Selected Poems
By: James Weldon Johnson, Sondra Kathryn Wilson
Format: Paperback
Number of Pages: 112
Vendor: Penguin Classics
Publication Date: 2000

Dimensions: 7.82 X 5.11 X 0.34 (inches)
Weight: 4 ounces
ISBN: 014118387X
ISBN-13: 9780141183879
Series: Penguin Classics
Stock No: WW8387X

Publisher's Description

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This selection of more than forty poems from a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance includes both uncompromising indictments of racial injustice and celebrations of the triumphs of African-Americans.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author Bio

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James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871. Among the first to break through the barriers segregating his race, he was educated at Atlanta University and at Columbia and was the first black admitted to the Florida bar. He was also, for a time, a songwriter in New York, American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, executive secretary of the NAACP, and professor of creative literature at Fisk University—experiences recorded in his autobiography, Along This Way. Other books by him include Saint Peter Relates an Incident, Black Manhattan, and God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. In addition to his own writing, Johnson was the editor of pioneering anthologies of black American poetry and spirituals. He died in 1938.