Page:W. E. B. Du Bois - The Gift of Black Folk.pdf/309

Rh Next we note the folk rhymes and poetry of Negroes, sometimes accompanying their music and sometimes not. A white instructor in English literature at the University of Virgina says: “Of all the builders of the nation the Negro alone has created a species of lyric verse that all the world may recognize as a distinctly American production.”

T. W. Talley, a Negro, has recently published an exhaustive collection of these rhymes. They form an interesting collection of poetry often crude and commonplace but with here and there touches of real poetry and quaint humor.

The literary expression of Negroes themselves has had continuous development in America since the eighteenth century. It may however be looked upon from two different points of view: We may think of the writing of Negroes as self-expression and as principally for themselves. Here we have a continuous line of writers. Only a few of these, however would we think of as contributing to American literature as such and yet this inner, smaller stream of Negro literature overflows faintly at first and now evidently more and more into the wider stream of American literature; on the other hand there have been figures in Ameri-