"CHATTERTON, SHELLEY, KEATS AND I": Reading Anne Spencer in the White Literary Tradition

As one of the most important female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, whose work was featured in The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and The Book of American Negro Poetry, as well as in the two most important journals of the Harlem Renaissance, The Crisis and Opportunity, Anne Spencer chose to employ rather than overturn existing literary structures. Many critics see a separation between her radical life as a civil rights activist and her more conventional art; however, one can not conclude that he can understand Spencer's work fairly as the product of a separation of her life as a black woman from her writing in a white male tradition. Here, Karapetkova reads Spencer within the white male tradition in which she envisioned her own writing.