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Rh The fugitive character of a great many of these volumes may be judged from the fact that not more than three-fourths of them can be located in the combined resources of the three largest libraries in America. Those that can be located would present a curiously heterogeneous appearance if examined together. They include broadsides, thin pamphlets on rough paper, quarto and folio pamphlets de luxe, evidently for presentation purposes, thick volumes coarsely printed and ill arranged, and a small sprinkling of volumes in the best taste of contemporary printers. The shabby appearance of many of the volumes is mute evidence of the financial and educational handicaps against which the authors had to struggle. Taken altogether they afford a fairly good index both to the faults and merits of Negro poetry and provide a historical view of its development.

Negro poetry in America begins with an illiterate slave, voicing inchoate religious sentiment in a crude broadside entitled An Evening Thought—Salvation by Christ, with Penetential Cries. Jupiter Hammon, the author, composed and published this poem nine years before Phillis Wheatley, generally considered the first Negro to write poetry in America, produced her first poem. Hammon was a slave owned by Mr. Joseph Lloyd, of Queen's Village, Long Island. A few of his subsequent poems, including An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley (1778) and A Winter Piece: being a serious Exhortation, with a call to the Unconverted (1782), have been preserved. They are all doggerel,