Two Lost Sonnets by Sterling A. Brown

The emergence of Sterling A. Brown into poetic maturity resulted from a well-known dialectical engagement with the aesthetics of African-American folk tradition. As Brown recounted so often, these experiential and imaginative encounters derived from a benevolent conspiracy between his theologian father, the Rev. Sterling Nelson Brown, and the eminent historian Carter G. Woodson to send the younger Brown South, to learn something about his people. Socially, this meant that at Virginia College and Seminary (1923–1926), before moving on to Lincoln University (1926–1928) and Fisk University (1928–1929), Sterling A. Brown began divesting himself of the confining Black middle-class ethos of Washington, D.C., and of a New England-Ivy League sensibility instilled by formal education at Williams College (1918–1922) and Harvard University (1922–1923). Aesthetically, the move South meant an enthusiastic immersion into and embrace of the Black South, especially its folk life, language, and lore—a relationship from which would come his best-known work. Lost, or at least understated, in this pursuit of a folk-based metaphysic is his point of departure.

Brown’s quest for a distinctive, engaging poetic voice began, as it did for most writers, with the self. According to archival sources containing his “apprentice” work, the young Brown was thoroughly steeped in late 19th-century Victorian poetry. For example, many of these early experiments clearly show an effort to gain formal mastery of the ballad, villanelle, ballade, hymn, and sonnet. Conceptually, Brown located his vision in an aesthetic that critic David Perkins, in another context, calls “the nineteenth century convention of personal utterance” ( A History of Modern Poetry 5). By developing themes of unrequited love, anger, self-recrimination, beauty, and self-doubt, he focused much of this early work on feelings, as if the very cultivation of emotion was poetry’s raison d’étre. These and other Brown poems self-consciously courted “racelessness,” symbolic expression, and the romantic excess that places emotion on a poetic pedestal. Although Brown preserved the best of these early poems in the “Vestiges” section of Southern Road and the “Remembrances” section of No Hiding Place, other poems reveal much about Brown’s developing proficiency.

Of these apprentice works, two poems—both sonnets—published by Brown during his lifetime remain uncollected: “For a Certain Youngster,” published in The Oracle in March 1925, and “After the Storm,” published in The Crisis in April 1927 (see Robert G. O’Meally’s revised bibliography in this issue for full citations). Many other poems written by Brown during this same period of time remain tucked away in his notebooks, unpublished at Brown’s own request. The two poems presented here then are merely representative and not meant as a complete record of his early work. They have been selected for publication because they are already available to any reader with the patience to search them out, because they are the only poems from these early trial pieces that contemporary editors thought worthy of publication, and because they contain elements of Brown’s future genius which bear critical scrutiny. These poems above all else provide a context for the stylistic tectonic shift Brown would undergo.

The first issue that must be addressed is the question of the composition date of these poems—both relative to each other and to Brown’s other work. Both sonnets appeared in the middle 1920s; however, examination of Brown’s manuscript notebooks indicates they were composed years prior to their publication. And, although “After the Storm” was published two years later than “To a Certain Youngster,” the notebook draft of “After the Storm” appears in an earlier entry, dated Spring 1921. (It appears in the same notebook as the later, undated “A Youngster to Young Men” that would eventually become “To a Certain Youngster.”) This must be remembered, because the delay between acceptance and publication varied from magazine to magazine, often obscuring the chronology of composition. “After the Storm,” for example, appeared in print roughly contemporary to much of the work later gathered in Southern Road, but it was composed at least six years prior to...