Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/223

Rh I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

Other specimens of free-verse have been given on pages 67, 102, and 119. In every instance the poet’s choice of this form seems to me justified by the particular effectiveness of it.

The name of no Negro author is more widely known than that of W. E. Burghardt DuBois. Editor, historian, sociologist, essayist, poet—he is celebrated in the Five Continents and the Seven Seas. It is in his impassioned prose that DuBois is most a poet. The Souls of Black Folk throbs constantly on the verge of poetry, while the several chapters of Darkwater end with a litany, chant, or credo, rhapsodical in character and in free-verse form.