Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

"The original edition, published in 1950, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This new, revised and expanded, edition contains, in addition to the introduction, an index of titles, an index of first lines, and 113 poems not included in the earlier volume."--Jacket.