The reason for this I hinted at in the first part of this preface. The
colored poet in the United States labors within limitations which he
cannot easily pass over. He is always on the defensive or the offensive.
The pressure upon him to be propagandic is well nigh irresistible. These
conditions are suffocating to breadth and to real art in poetry. In
addition he labors under the handicap of finding culture not entirely
colorless in the United States. On the other hand, the colored poet of
Latin-America can voice the national spirit without any reservations. And
he will be rewarded without any reservations, whether it be to place him
among the great or declare him the greatest.

So I think it probable that the first world-acknowledged Aframerican poet
will come out of Latin-America. Over against this probability, of course,
is the great advantage possessed by the colored poet in the United States
of writing in the world-conquering English language.

This preface has gone far beyond what I had in mind when I started. It was
my intention to gather together the best verses I could find by Negro
poets and present them with a bare word of introduction. It was not my
plan to make this collection inclusive nor to make the book in any sense a
book of criticism. I planned to present only verses by contemporary
writers; but, perhaps, because this is the first collection of its kind, I
realized the absence of a starting-point and was led to provide one and to
fill in with historical data what I felt to be a gap.

It may be surprising to many to see how little of the poetry being written
by Negro poets to-day is being written in Negro dialect. The newer Negro
poets show a tendency to discard dialect; much of the subject-matter which
went into the making of traditional dialect poetry, 'possums, watermelons,
etc., they have discarded altogether, at least, as poetic material. This