The Poetry of Dodson by Owen Dodson

First published:Powerful Long Ladder, 1946; Cages, 1953; The Confession Stone: Song Cycles, 1970 (with James Van DerZee and Camille Billops); The Harlem Book of the Dead, 1978

Type of work: Poetry

An Early Poetic Influence

One of nine children, Owen Dodson was born on November 28, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, to Nathaniel Barnett Dodson, a freelance journalist, and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Goode Dodson. Owen grew up proud of his identity and of his lineage. He early knew of the social contributions of such black luminaries as Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Fate conspired to turn the young Owen Dodson into the writer he became. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School; the school’s principal, Elias Lieberman, was a poet. Lieberman encouraged the boy to enter contests that resulted in his winning medals for public recitations of verse. Owen was at this time also active in the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, where he imbibed the cadences of black spirituals with which he was later to infuse his verse.

Upon graduation from high school, Dodson received a scholarship to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where he enrolled in a freshman course that John Berkelman taught. Dodson brashly told Berkelman that he had the capability to write sonnets as good as those of John Keats. Berkelman thereupon told Dodson to write a sonnet a week until graduation. Carrying out this assignment helped Dodson to perfect his craft and resulted in his publishing pieces in the New York Herald Tribune, in Opportunity, and in Phylon before he left Bates in 1936 to continue his studies at Yale University, where he received an M.F.A. degree in 1939.

Although Dodson was diverted from writing poetry first by the demands of his program in drama at Yale and later by his service in the United States Navy, where he was assigned to write dramas to boost the morale of black servicemen, a number of his poems appeared in such publications as Common Ground, New Currents, Theatre Arts, and Harlem Quarterly between 1942 and the publication of his first volume of verse, Powerful Long Ladder, in 1946. The poems Dodson published in these periodicals were incorporated into this first volume. During his time at Yale, Dodson also produced his verse play, Divine Comedy (pr. 1938), a portion of which appears in Powerful Long Ladder and which was awarded the Maxwell Anderson prize for verse drama. Although Dodson felt that his greatest poetic achievement was The Confession Stone: Song Cycles, which he first published in 1970, most critics have turned to the earlier work as best representing Dodson’s poetry.

Powerful Long Ladder

Powerful Long Ladder is concerned with human struggle, particularly with the struggle of black people in a society that first enslaved and then simultaneously exploited and ignored them. At the time the book was published, segregation was widespread. Dodson had recently been discharged from the Navy, where he belonged to a segregated company at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside Chicago.

The book, divided into five sections, takes its title from the Dodson poem “Someday We’re Gonna Tear Them Pillars Down,” a seven-page verse drama that uses dramatic technique to the utmost. The pillars are symbolically akin to the wall in Robert Frost’s famous poem “Mending Wall”; they are barriers that serve as points of demarcation between people—in the Dodson poem, between African Americans and the dominant society.

Dodson has often been compared to Frost. In a sense, however, this comparison may be misleading because of Dodson’s deep personal involvement on a daily basis with the inequities of segregation and discrimination, which continually devoured his spirit. Robert Frost could afford a philosophical detachment that no black of Owen Dodson’s period could reasonably enjoy.

The first section of Powerful Long Ladder contains a dozen poems of from two to six pages each. The range of these poems is remarkable. Some focus on individuals; others deal broadly with topics ranging from racial tension to death to the accomplishments of African Americans. Many of them are dialect poems. The first poem, “Lament,” which is not in dialect, is exceptionally interesting, beginning with an imperative to a dead boy to wake and tell how he died. What the poem essentially conveys is the hopelessness of trying fully to understand life’s common abstractions—love, freedom, terror, death.

A more complicated view of human existence emanates from “Guitar,” a ballad about a black jailed for hitting a white person. Society decrees that, without solid evidence, the black should be adjudged guilty. This poem has strong metrical overtones from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. The tone of the poem is one of despair tempered by resignation. The black man has no recourse as society is constituted.

Among the best-known Dodson poems is “Black Mother Praying,” a war poem about a mother whose sons have left to defend their country. She compares her sacrifice to Christ’s crucifixion, her sons to the son of Mary. The rub is that when her sons come home—if they come home—the freedom they fought to ensure will, because of their color, extend neither to her nor to them. This poem is a precursor of Dodson’s The Confession Stone, in which Dodson makes the Virgin Mary and her son quite ordinary people dealing with the details of daily life. Mary admonishes the young Jesus not to play with Judas when he goes out.

The second section of Powerful Long Ladder contains a substantial excerpt from Dodson’s verse play, Divine Comedy, which is an ironic presentation of the kind of hope that the evangelist Father Divine offered his hapless followers, most of them black, for several decades. Dodson as a boy went to one of Father Divine’s meetings with his brother Kenneth and never forgot the experience. Like Jesus feeding the five thousand, Father Divine fed his followers. He drew milk from a seemingly bottomless well. When the crowd had dispersed, however, Kenneth lifted the tablecloth to find that a black boy was underneath pumping milk into the vat from which Father Divine magically extracted it.

Surely this experience provided an initial stimulus for Divine Comedy, which also has many structural elements borrowed from Dante’s masterpiece. Dodson’s verse drama provides, in essence, a startling insight into how black people, stripped of much of their hope, can be exploited and duped, as Father Divine’s followers usually were, even by their fellow black people.

The other sections of Powerful Long Ladder, “Poems for My Brother Kenneth,” “All This Review,” and “Counterpoint,” develop the racial themes that Dodson examines in the earlier sections. The latter sections, though, show a growing artistic maturity on the author’s part, particularly in the lyricism with which he approaches his material.

The twenty-four-year hiatus between Powerful Long Ladder and The Confession Stone occurred because Dodson was serving as professor of drama at Howard University. During this period—1947 until 1969—Dodson concentrated primarily on writing plays, although he did write two novels, The Boy in the Window, published in 1951, and A Bent House, completed when a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 enabled Dodson to spend an extended period in Italy. This novel did not appear until 1977, retitled Come Home Early, Child.

The thin poetry collection Cages, which Dodson also completed during his stay in Italy, explores essentially the same racial themes that are found in his first collection. The Confession Stone consists of seven brief sections, including comments by Mary on Jesus, letters from Joseph to Mary, journals of Mary Magdalene, songs from Judas to Jesus, songs by Jesus to God, songs by God to His son, and a final song by Mary to Jesus. The parallels between the biblical epic and the racial situation from which Dodson wrote are striking. An additional volume of Dodson’s poems remained unpublished at his death.

Owen Dodson was caught between two compelling movements, a part of neither. The Harlem Renaissance had run its course by the time Dodson began to emerge as a literary figure. Ahead lay the black militancy of the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

When Powerful Long Ladder appeared in 1946, some critics considered it too much concerned with issues of race, although these critics, including John Holmes, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, found considerable promise in Dodson’s writing. Alfred Kreymborg commented on the notable dramatic qualities in Dodson’s poetry, observing that the poet could infuse old topics such as estranged love with “fire, wisdom, and dignity.” Richard Eberhart, on the basis of this first volume, called Dodson the best black poet in the United States.

The poems in Powerful Long Ladder are largely concerned with the effects of continuing poverty and prejudice upon a race transplanted from its own continent, enslaved, and freed only to endure humiliation and repression from mainstream society. Obviously, in a poem such as “Autumn Chorus: After the Prophet Has Been Killed,” the poet uses such dramatic devices as dialogue and a chorus to sustain a plaint that seems eerily prescient: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive but were scarcely known to the public at the time that this chilling poem was written.

To those nonblack critics who suggest that Dodson was too much concerned with race, one can only say that a cauldron of racial tension was simmering and was soon to boil over in America. Dodson was daily exposed to the tensions that within twenty years would result in the violence that darkened the 1960’s. He could not ignore the strife he saw around him.

On the other hand, Dodson did not consciously fan the fires that were smoldering. He was being objective, but his objectivity was from the black rather than the white point of view. Therefore, his stance seemed to many whites to be more extreme than it was.

The most personal and, in some ways, the most deeply felt poems in Powerful Long Ladder are those contained in the section entitled “Poems for My Brother Kenneth,” in which Dodson reflects on personal memories and relives portions of his youth. The racial tone in these poems is more subdued than in the other sections of this collection, although it necessarily intrudes even upon these poems.

Dodson and African American Identity

Dodson resisted being identified with African Americans who were grouped merely by their color. Invited to join Bates College’s black alumni association, he declined, asking, “Did I learn black Latin?” His poems continually reflect a similar attitude. He suggests that if African Americans are to become a part of mainstream American life, such organizations as black alumni associations must go.

In his poems, Dodson exudes energy. He does not shrink from the struggle in which his race, in his eyes, must participate actively—and he suggests that white people can help in this struggle. In “Miss Packard and Miss Giles,” Dodson celebrates the two white women who founded Spelman College for Negro Women in Atlanta, where he taught from 1938 until 1941. He commends their stalwartness, their refusal to return to their native New England when things were not going well.

Similarly, in poems such as “Epitaph for a Negro Woman” and “Black Mother Praying,” the suggestion is that people must keep moving forward, struggling hand over hand up the ladder that provides the title for Dodson’s first volume of poetry. In small details of his later life, Dodson followed his own advice.

When, severely crippled by arthritis, Dodson went to an experimental theatrical production with James Hatch, he had to climb a long flight of stairs to reach the auditorium. Giving Hatch his canes, he grasped the railing and, quite painfully, pulled himself up the stairs, refusing help offered by passersby. In this act, Dodson was playing out the philosophy that many of his poems espouse.

Throughout his career, Dodson wrote poignant death poems, some celebrating the deaths of individuals, such as “Countee Cullen” in Powerful Long Ladder, others addressing the topic generally. He wrote the poems for The Harlem Book of the Dead, a collection of funeral photographs taken by James Van DerZee and assembled by Camille Billops.

Most of Dodson’s death poems express the sentiment that death, the great equalizer, diminishes one’s blackness. The earth consumes it, a thought which appears to be comforting for the poet. One of his last poems, “There Are No Tears” (1981), suggests that grief “photographs” all that has been. It is not accompanied by tears or the sounds of trombones, but the dead person’s “heart is quiet;/ A grain of sand./ His beach is not afraid/ Of the ocean anymore.”

Owen Dodson was an inheritor of the black poetic tradition established by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen, to whom Dodson acknowledges his debt. He was also well acquainted with the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, although his poetry seems less influenced by their work than by that of poets closer to him in time.

Dodson was different from most of the black poets before him, because he had essentially been reared in a middle-class northern black family that was not dysfunctional in the way that, for example, Langston Hughes’s family was. Dodson’s going to New England to attend a predominantly white college also set him apart, as did his further education at Yale University.

Although he knew what it was to feel discrimination and to be subjected to segregation, Dodson also knew what it was to be accepted and not to endure segregation. Perhaps this dichotomy made him feel more deeply than some earlier black poets the stings of racial prejudice when he encountered them. His was essentially a moderate voice bridging the period between the Harlem Renaissance, with its artistic promise, and the racial strife of the 1960’s.

Bibliography

Hardy, Sallee W., ed. Remembering Owen Dodson. New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1984. This is a collection of reminiscences, poems, and other materials about Owen Dodson presented at his funeral. Among the contributors are Margaret Walker, David Abram, Amiri Baraka, and Joe Weixlmann.

Hatch, James V. “Remembering Owen Dodson.” In Artist and Influence, 1985. New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1985. Hatch, who first met Dodson when he participated in a playwriting workshop at the University of Iowa while Hatch was a student there, provides warm reminiscences about an evening when he and Dodson, then badly crippled and barely mobile, went to see a new play written by one of Hatch’s students.

O’Brien, John. “Owen Dodson.” In Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. O’Brien conducted this hourlong interview in 1971. Dodson later supplemented it with written responses. It is revealing in that Dodson comments on other black writers and clearly distances himself from some who wrote in the turbulent 1960’s. Dodson discusses the themes of religion and history in his work.

Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. “The Legendary Owen Dodson of Howard University.” Crisis 86 (November, 1979): 373-374. Peterson, although not the most disinterested critic of Dodson, has, nevertheless, a good feeling for his writing and for its place in and relationship to black writing in the United States generally.

Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards Press, 1973. Schraufnagel devotes only two pages to Dodson and concentrates essentially on his novels. Nevertheless, his comments help to place Dodson in a useful literary context.