An African Elegy (Historical Context)

Historical Context

In the early 1940s when Duncan wrote “An African Elegy,” a group of poets and critics, who came to be known as the New Critics, helped to determine what kind of poetry would be published and read in the coming decades. Writers associated with this trend in criticism include Allen Tate, R. P. Black-mur, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, and John Crowe Ransom, who edited the The Kenyon Review and whose book The New Criticism (1941) gave the group its name. The members of the New Critics, who were mostly southerners and politically conservative, held formalist views of literature and argued that poems and stories be considered for their inherent value. This meant that literary works should be regarded as self-contained objects, separate from the traditions, histories, and authors that helped to produce them. Though they never established a doctrine as such, New Critics introduced critical principles and terms into the study of literature that remain today. It is ironic that Ransom rejected “An African Elegy” after reading Duncan’s essay on homosexuals in society, for it shows that Ransom did not practice what he preached. By 1959, when Duncan finally published the poem, New Criticism had become entrenched in English departments throughout the United States and helped form the theoretical background against which millions of students would come to learn literature.

At about the same time, in Asheville, North Carolina, a progressive school in the arts was developing. Black Mountain College, founded in 1933, was an experiment in community education and appealed to many musicians, dancers, and writers who considered themselves part of the artistic avant-garde. Duncan taught there in 1956, as did other poets and writers associated with Duncan such as Charles Olson, Robert Creely, Paul Blackburn, and Denise Levertov. Olson’s theory of poetry, as outlined in his essay “Projective Verse” (1950), became a doctrine of sorts for Black Mountain poets. He was also the leader of the college and the poets. These writers all shared a desire to explore the creative process and to integrate the arts. They saw poems as fields of meaning into which anything and everything was permitted and readers as active participants in meaning-making. Olson saw poetry beginning with the human body. He believed that the way a poem appears on the page should be related to how the poet experienced it and how the reader will experience it. Creely applied Olson’s theories to his own poetry, writing a process-oriented poetry which drew attention to the writer’s thinking as he went along. Levertov, on the other hand, focused on the perceiving rather than the thinking mind as it detailed the surfaces of ordinary objects to evoke their presence and underlying meanings. Duncan, while influenced by Olson’s thinking, attempted to create a poetry that was closer to religion or religious vision. His use of Greek myth and classical literature gave his writing an erudite, almost ethereal feel at times. Projectivist verse was regularly published by journals including The Black Mountain Review and Origin. Painters, photographers, musicians, and dancers such as Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Jess Collins (Duncan’s life-partner) also taught or gave presentations at Black Mountain.

Although there are references to Africa and the Congo throughout Duncan’s poem, they are symbolic rather than historical references. When Duncan wrote this poem, the United States had just become involved in World War II. Duncan himself spent time in the army but was granted a psychiatric discharge in 1941. Thanks to the war, the country was finally coming out of the Great Depression, as more than fifteen million Americans worked for the armed forces. African Americans, however, didn’t benefit from the job boom. One group, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, marched on Washington, D.C., calling for an end to discrimination. Shortly after this protest, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate complaints and make discrimination in war industries illegal.

Compare & Contrast

• 1958: Patrice Lumumba founds the Movement National Congolais (MNC), which becomes the most dominant political party of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  1960 – 1965: Political turmoil engulfs The Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba is assassinated by forces loyal to Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, who eventually takes over the government in 1965.

  1971: Seko renames the country the Republic of Zaire and asks Zairean citizens to change their names to African names.

  1997: Seko is overthrown by Laurent Kabila and Rwandan-backed rebels, who “re-rename” the country the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  2000: Political unrest continues in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• 1956: Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” is published and embraced by the counterculture. In the poem, Ginsberg calls for America to wake up from its middle-class, sterile slumber that crushes the human soul and to end the “human war” on its own people.

  1997: Ginsberg dies at 70. The Beat culture, for which Ginsberg was a central figure, is a historical curiosity and has been reduced to slogans and symbols used in advertising campaigns.