“Belch the pity! / Straddle the city!”: Helene Johnson’s Late Poetry and the Rhetoric of Empowerment

Complementing recent critical efforts to recuperate Helene Johnson as a seminal voice of the 1920s and ’30s, this essay considers her late poems, which have been critically understudied thus far. This essay argues that Johnson continued to revise and rework the rhetoric of empowerment that characterizes her New Negro-era poetry long after she ceased publishing. In particular, she remained in poetic opposition to the Anglo-American male privilege—represented most notably by her allusions to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—that pushed Johnson and her African American feminist perspective to the margins decades before.