When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(John Keats, from ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’)
The Harlem Renaissance is regarded as a very important cultural movement and a significant contributor to the development of American literature. It materialized in the 1920s, although some accounts date it as early as 1919, and it evaporated some time in the 1930s. It included a great outpouring of Black American writing, producing some of the most acclaimed black writers of the twentieth century.
While it is called a ‘renaissance,‘ there are those who argue that that is a misnomer since there was a major
