Fenton Johnson (poet)

Early life and career

Johnson was born on May 7, 1888 in Chicago, Illinois to parents Elijah and Jesse (Taylor) Johnson. His father, Elijah Johnson, was a railroad porter and his family was one of the wealthiest African American families in Chicago during this time. That his family owned the State Street building in which they lived provides evidence of such a financial security. According to a biographical note by Arna Bontemps, Johnson is anecdotally described as being “a dapper boy who drove his own electric automobile around Chicago.” Growing up, Johnson recounts himself as "having scribbled since the age of nine," but even despite these indications of a literary inclination, Johnson did not initially plan to embark on a career in letters, and certainly not poetry specifically. Rather, throughout this childhood, Johnson intended to pursue an office in the clergy.

The entirely of Johnson’s childhood was spent in Chicago, and he received his secondary education at various secondary public schools in the city, including Englewood High School and Wendell Phillips High School. Johnson first began his undergraduate education at Northwestern University, which he attended from 1908-1909. He went on to complete his degree at the University of Chicago. Johnson later received a degree from the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Following his graduation from the University of Chicago, Fenton worked as a messenger and in the post office before he began to teach English at the State University of Louisville, which was a private, black, Baptist-owned institution in Kentucky that would later would become Simmons College. He only taught at the State University of Louisville from 1910-1911, and returned to Chicago in 1911 to concentrate on his literary career.

Literary career

In 1913, Johnson published his first volume of poetry, A Little Dreaming. The collection was a self-published work, along with his next two collections, Visions of the Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916). But between the release of his first and second collection of poetry, Fenton Johnson moved to New York, where he completed his degree at the Pulitzer School of Journalism with the financial support of a benefactor.

Following the release of his third book of poetry, Johnson moved back to Chicago, where he became one of the founding editors of The Champion in 1916. The Champion was formed in conjunction with Henry Bing Dismond, his cousin, who was also an aspiring poet and popular athlete, one of the few African American college graduates chosen for officer training with the Army’s Eighth Illinois Regiment at Camp Des Moines in 1918. The publication focused on black achievements and was published monthly. Two years after founding The Champion, in 1918, Johnson went on to found The Favorite Magazine, subtitled The World’s Greatest Monthly, with Dismond.

The Favorite Magazine published a few of Johnson’s poems, and around this time Johnson’s short stories were also being published in The Crisis. In addition to the short stories published in The Crisis, Johnson published his own collection of short stories entitled Tales of Darkest America in 1920. In the same year, he published a book of essays entitled For the Highest Good. During this period as well, from about 1912 and following through 1925, Johnson established connections in Chicago with the Harriet Monroe group, and several of his poems were accepted for the poetry magazine Poetry. In addition to his work published in Poetry, Johnson also found publication in the anthology formed by poet Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 called Others: A Magazine of the New Verse. One of his most famous poems, “Tired,” was published in 1919 in Others and it was also published in The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922, among other poems of his. Johnson completed or nearly completed a fourth collection of poems entitled African Nights, but he did not succeed in publishing the collection.

In addition to his poetry, editing, and essay writing, Johnson also worked as a playwright. By the age of nineteen, he says, Johnson plays had been “produced on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre, Chicago.” In 1925, his play entitled “The Cabaret Girl” was performed at the Shadow Theatre in Chicago, the only performed play of his on record.

In the 1930s, Johnson worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago. Directed by Arna Bontemps, the Federal Writers’ Project focused on writing about the black experience in Illinois. Bontemps acted as Johnson’s literary executor, additionally.

Johnson has had a consistent presence in anthologies beginning with the Book of American Negro Poetry, Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin’s The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English (1923) and Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927).

Criticism and reception

The poetry of Fenton Johnson has often been by critics to be characterized by great irony and a kind of hopelessness resulting from an embattled African American experience. In his introduction to Fenton Johnson in The Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson writes that in many of Johnson’s poems, “there is nothing left to fight or even hope for.” Yet, James Weldon Johnson continues, “these poems of despair possess tremendous power and constitute Fenton Johnson’s best work.” Fenton Johnson is often seen as a poet who possesses a particularly fatalistic perspective branching from his experience as an African American, and this type of embittered poetry is what he is most known for.

Also in his introduction, Johnson makes a few claims about Johnson’s earlier works, finding that his first book of poetry, A Little Dreaming, “was without marked distinction.”

James Weldon Johnson also indicates in his introduction to Johnson that it was during the war period that Fenton Johnson adopted free verse, and “broke away from all traditions and ideas of Negro Poetry.” This newfound “formlessness,” Johnson found, “voiced the disillusionment and bitterness of feeling the Negro race was then experiencing.” For James Weldon Johnson, then, Fenton Johnson’s poetry became associated with despair, and such was how Johnson became framed within the larger The Book of the American Negro Poetry project, and subsequently in other anthologies. This “bitter” Fenton is particularly encapsulated in the lines of his poem “Tired”: “I am tired of work. I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization,” the poem reads.

Johnson has a particular legacy within American Modernist poetry. He is noted to have been a part of writers who would become the makers of a “new” poetry, which sought to “throw over the traditions of American Poetry,” as James Weldon Johnson would describe it. These “new” poems appeared in Poetry, Others and later, The Liberator, and they marked a progression from “commonplace traditionalism to the most revolutionary naturalism, from the rhymed, carefully scanned line to free verse, from conventionalized Negro dialect to the brawny language of Sandberg’s Chicago Poems.”

While “Tired” has been frequently anthologized, Johnson’s earlier poems were made in more “conventional modes,” including dialect poetry, as found in his first book, A Little Dreaming. The collection considered a wide range of topics, from a poem on Paul Laurence Dunbar, entitled “Dunbar,” to medieval themes such as in “Lancelot’s Defiance.” Additionally, A Little Dreaming contains a customary Scottish poem, Irish poem, and even Yiddish poem, which points to a whole range of poetic influences during the early part of his poetic career. In Visions of the Dusk and Songs of the Soil, Johnson begins to incorporate “Negro spirituals,” and here the transition into themes more heavily influenced by the African American experience might be observed. In Songs of the Soil, Johnson writes that “The Negro has a history, and it is something more than a peasant.” Transitioning from here to the poem “Tired,” we might find the “black revolutionary poet” that James Weldon Johnson proclaims Fenton Johnson to be and how many perceive him today.

Personal life

Johnson was married to Cecilia Rhone. He was a member of the Authors League of America and of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Works

Anthologies