Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/265



admirable is the disposition of Negro verse-writers to eulogize the notable personages of their race, the men and women who have blazed the trail of advance. The mention of Attucks, Black Sampson, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others like these, all practically unknown to white readers, is frequent, and reverential odes and sonnets to Douglass, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Washington, Dunbar, are many and enthusiastic. Here as elsewhere, however, I refrain from giving mere titles and from comments on productions merely cited. The reader will find such poems as I allude to in every poet’s volume.