Black History Month Profiles: "When the exceptional historian comes along, you have a poet."

Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (1898-1966)

Poet, educator, legendary debate coach

Grandson of slaves, Tolson graduated Lincoln University in 1924, and took a teaching post at the historically African-American Wiley University in Marshall, Texas. There, in addition to his classes, he ran the dramatic program and raised a champion debate team that won national fame for defeating the University of Southern California team in 1935. The team’s success was recreated in the 2007 film, The Great Debaters, with Denzel Washington playing Tolson (the film changed the matchup to one with Harvard).

In 1930-31 Tolson did graduate work at Columbia University, presenting a thesis on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He took up poetry in that period, though his first significant published work, Dark Symphony, won a competition in 1939. It was printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1941, raising Tolson to national attention. He published his first collection of poetry in 1944, and three years later was named Poet Laureate of Liberia.

That year he took a post at Langston University in Oklahoma, there also teaching and directing the theater program. He was named permanent fellow in poetry and drama at the Bread Loaf writer’s colony in 1954, a year after winning acclaim for Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, an eight-part epic written for the nation’s centenary.He was also one of the founders of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Tolson also served as mayor of Langston for three terms, 1952-58. His last collection of poetry, published in 1965, won the praise of many critics, including John Ciardi, though, overall, his work did not enjoy the fame it might have had he not spent his career in the segregationist southwest. In the midst of his appointment as Avalon Poetry in the Tuskegee Institute, he was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1966.

Tolson’s poetry is rich and allusive, moving back and forth between high and low culture idioms. His work showed a progression from an easy accessibility that Langston Hughes praised, to a more complex modernist style as he found his voice. Since Tolson’s death, his work has received more scholarly attention as part of the reappraisal of the forgotten and overlooked African-American writers of the 20th century. The University of Virginia published his collected works in 1999.

A Song for Myself

   I judge

                                           My soul

                                           Eagle

                                           Nor mole:

                                           A man

                                           Is what

                                           He saves

                                           From rot.

                                          

                                           The corn

                                           Will fat

                                           A hog

                                           Or rat:

                                           Are these

                                           Dry bones

                                           A hut’s

                                           Or throne’s?

                                          

                                           Who filled

                                           The moat

                                           ’Twixt sheep

                                           And goat?

                                           Let Death,

                                           The twin

                                           of Life,

                                           Slip in?

                                          

                                           Prophets

                                           Arise,

                                           Mask-hid,

                                           Unwise,

                                           Divide

                                           The earth

                                           By class

                                           and birth.

                                          

                                           Caesars

                                           Without,

                                           The People

                                           Shall rout;

                                           Caesars

                                           Within,

                                           Crush flat

                                           As tin.

                                          

                                           Who makes

                                           A noose

                                           Envies

                                           The goose.

                                           Who digs

                                           A pit

                                           Dices

                                           For it.

                                          

                                           Shall tears

                                           Be shed

                                           For those

                                           Whose bread

                                           Is thieved

                                           Headlong?

                                           Tears right

                                           No wrong.

                                          

                                           Prophets

                                           Shall teach

                                           The meek

                                           To reach.

                                           Leave not

                                           To God

                                           The boot

                                           And rod.

                                          

                                           The straight

                                           Lines curve?

                                           Failure

                                           Of nerve?

                                           Blind-spots

                                           Assail?

                                           Times have

                                           Their Braille.

                                          

                                           If hue

                                           Of skin

                                           Trademark

                                           A sin,

                                           Blame not

                                           The make

                                           For God's

                                           Mistake.

                                          

                                           Since flesh

                                           And bone

                                           Turn dust

                                           And stone,

                                           With life

                                           So brief,

                                           Why add

                                           To grief?

                                          

                                           I sift

                                           The chaff

                                           From wheat

                                           and laugh.

                                           No curse

                                           Can stop

                                           The tick

                                           Of clock.

                                          

                                           Those who

                                           Wall in

                                           Themselves

                                           And grin

                                           Commit

                                           Incest

                                           And spawn

                                           A pest.

                                          

                                           What’s writ

                                           In vice

                                           Is writ

                                           In ice.

                                           The truth

                                           Is not

                                           Of fruits

                                           That rot.

                                          

                                           A sponge,

                                           The mind

                                           Soaks in

                                           The kind

                                           Of stuff

                                           That fate’s

                                           Milieu

                                           Dictates.

                                          

                                           Jesus,

                                           Mozart,

                                           Shakespeare,

                                           Descartes,

                                           Lenin,

                                           Chladni,

                                           Have lodged

                                           With me.

                                          

                                           I snatch

                                           From hooks

                                           The meat

                                           Of books.

                                           I seek

                                           Frontiers,

                                           Not worlds

                                           On biers.

                                          

                                           The snake

                                           Entoils

                                           The pig

                                           With coils.

                                           The pig’s

                                           Skewed wail

                                           Does not

                                           Prevail.

                                          

                                           Old men

                                           Grow worse

                                           With prayer

                                           Or curse:

                                           Their staffs

                                           Thwack youth

                                           Starved thin

                                           For truth.

                                          

                                           Today

                                           The Few

                                           Yield poets

                                           Their due;

                                           Tomorrow

                                           The Mass

                                           Judgment

                                           Shall pass.

                                          

                                           I harbor

                                           One fear

                                           If death

                                           Crouch near:

                                           Does my

                                           Creed span

                                           The Gulf

                                           Of Man?

                                          

                                           And when

                                           I go

                                           In calm

                                           Or blow

                                           From mice

                                           And men,

                                           Selah!

                                           What . . . then?

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