SPENCER, Anne

Born 6 February 1882, Henry County, Virginia; died 27 July 1975, Lynchburg, Virginia

Daughter of Joel C. and Sarah Cephus Scales; married Edward Spencer, 1901

Anne Spencer was the only child of divorced parents; she had no formal education before the age of eleven, when she entered Lynchburg Seminary. Spencer lived with her husband in Lynchburg, where for the next 20 years her local fame derived chiefly from the beautiful garden she cultivated. Throughout this period, Spencer also wrote poems for her private pleasure, and at the urging of James Weldon Johnson, in 1920 she began to publish her work. Over the next three decades, her poems appeared in almost every major anthology of black American poetry.

In many of her poems, Spencer rejects this world of ugliness, impurity, and hate and replaces it with a visionary world of beauty and love. The sonnet "Substitution" is the clearest statement of this theme. A love for natural scenery in general and for her garden in particular provided a metaphorical setting for several works. The central conceit of "Life-Long Poor Browning" mourns the fact the poet never enjoyed the beauties of Virginia. Here and elsewhere, Spencer reveals an affinity for the technical devices and philosophical concerns of the metaphysical poets.

Spencer used the traditions of English poetry, but she was not a conventional poet. Her best poems remain fresh and strikingly original. "At the Carnival" offers a finely hued, evocative description of a tawdry street fair. Onlookers like "the limousine lady" and "the bull-necked man," "the unholy incense" of the sausage and garlic booth, the dancing tent where "a quivering female-thing gestured assignations," and the crooked games of chance combine to produce an atmosphere of unrelieved ugliness and depravity. Yet the possibility of beauty exists even here, in the person of a young female diver, the "Naiad of the Carnival Tank." Her presence transforms the scene.

Usually Spencer's references to the world of reality were more oblique. That she was aware of life's travails, particularly as they affect women, is nonetheless evident. Her poem "Letter to My Sister" begins: "It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods." Despite her participation in the civil rights struggle and her work as a librarian in the local black high school, Spencer rarely employed racial themes in her poetry. An autobiographical statement she wrote for Countee Cullen's anthology, Caroling Dusk (1927), suggests the reason: "I write about the things I love. But have no civilized articulation for the things I hate." Spencer's posture was typical of the black female poets of her generation.

Several of her critics have drawn comparisons between Spencer and Emily Dickinson. They share a penchant for cryptic imagery and perhaps a similar method of composition, but Spencer is not the major poet Dickinson is. As her biographer, J. Lee Greene, attests, the wonder is that Spencer became a poet at all. A Southern black woman with little education, who belonged to no literary coterie and lived her entire life in small, provincial towns, Spencer proved by writing poetry of the quality she did, when she did, though dangerous, it is not impossible to defy society's gods.

Other Works:

Anne Spencer's poems may be found in the following volumes: Brown, S., A. P. Davis, and U. Lee, The Negro Caravan (1941); Greene, J. L., Time's Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer's Life and Poetry (1977); Johnson, J. W., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931).

Bibliography:

Brown, S., Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). Gilbert, S. and S. Gubar, eds., Shakespeare's Sister (1979). Greene, J. L., Time's Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer's Life and Poetry (1977). Honey, M., ed., Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (1989). Stetson, E., ed., Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980 (1981).

Reference works:

Notable Black American Women (1992). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

A Journal (March 1978). Echoes from the Garden: The Anne Spencer Story (documentary film, 1980).

—CHERYL A. WALL