Poetic brokers

Poetic Brokers is the first study to offer a comparative reading of Robert Hayden’s and Melvin B. Tolson’s poetry. Robert Hayden (1913-1980) and Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966) establish a vantage point on African American poetry that is cosmopolitan, dialogic, and progressive. More often than not, however, Hayden and Tolson have been portrayed as chroniclers of history and traitors of the black heritage. This study reconsiders their poetry in order to bring to the forefront Hayden’s and Tolson’s visions of transnational partnership that find expression through syntheses of foreign languages, cultures, and traditions with the African American past. Crossing color and culture lines, Hayden and Tolson thus recontextualize American and African American literary history within the wider framework of world literature.