Caroling Dusk

Caroling Dusk gathers verse by Negro poets into a single, urgent chorus, offering not just a collection but a declaration of literary breadth and continuity. Countee Cullen frames the anthology as a needed answer to earlier landmark collections, insisting that a new generation has emerged through the energy of magazines such as Opportunity and The Crisis and deserves to be heard on its own terms. He honors Paul Laurence Dunbar as a foundational figure while rejecting any single racial formula for Black poetry, presenting instead a wide range of voices, forms, and artistic temperaments. That diversity runs through the book's poems, which move from dialect and blues-inflected lyrics to sonnets, modernist fragments, and international forms. Dunbar's work appears as a touchstone, with poems of concealment, grief, exhaustion, friendship, and quiet defiance, alongside a biographical note that restores his devotion to standard English verse. The anthology also features Joseph S. Cotter, Sr. and Jr., whose poems draw on hardship, family loss, faith, and moral struggle, and Jean Toomer, whose luminous Southern pieces fuse labor, ancestry, music, and memory into a haunting vision of Black life, resilience, and artistic self-definition. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.