Sonnet

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1893

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Socio-Historical Context

The generations of African Americans who grew up in the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861-1865) had very different experiences depending on whether they grew up in the North or the South. Many Southern African Americans from this time held memories of their parents’ or grandparents’ enslavement. Some of the Southern Black artists who rose to prominence around this time were even formerly enslaved themselves. Though slavery was abolished following the American Civil War, many emancipated African Americans had few employment options and were forced back into slave-like conditions. Many of the poets and artists who later became part of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson included, experienced concomitant hardship.

Johnson grew up in the South and was born only six years after the end of the Civil War. Though his family originally lived in the Northern United States after moving there from the Bahamas, Johnson himself was born in Florida. Coming from an educated and cultured middle-class family, however, Johnson had many standard American privileges that were not typically afforded to Black people at the time—particularly those in the South. Johnson’s engagement with traditional literary forms, language, and symbols in “Sonnet” reflects the uncommon cultural education in his youth. Not only were many Black people barred from higher education, but they were also not often introduced to classic literature. The poem’s form and subject matter could be interpreted as an attempt to bridge the gap between classic Western poetry and Johnson’s contemporary Black experience.

Literary Context

Though “Sonnet” was published at the turn of the 20th century, during the Harlem Renaissance, “Sonnet” has very little in common with much contemporary poetry. Though the sonnet form has never gone out of fashion since its development in Renaissance Italy, American poetic expression in Johnson’s era tended toward more experimental, free-verse forms. Walt Whitman, for instance, self-published his influential collection Leaves of Grass only one year prior to Johnson’s “Sonnet.”

The young Johnson likely did not read Whitman, but his calling back to a 13th-century mode of poetic expression is significant. Johnson was fully aware of the implications of this decision, and he likely titled the poem after its form for emphasis’ sake. In particular, Johnson’s use of the Shakespearean sonnet—named after William Shakespeare, who popularized the form—could be an attempt to engage the canonical English poets who used the form. Alternatively, Johnson’s use of the sonnet form might demonstrate his artfully situating the Black experience within a white-centric literary tradition that previously ignored, distorted, or outright erased that experience. (A later subsection of the guide, “Form and Meter,” discusses the particularities of Johnson’s use of the sonnet form.)