What Makes Libretto Difficult? Reading Past the Text: an analysis on the societal and academic pressures Tolson faced

 

(Melvin B. Tolson and Tate Allen, the latter of whom wrote the controversial preface for Tolson's Libretto). 

What made Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia such a difficult read? While on the surface level, its demanding nature could be explained by the thick layering of allusions, foreign languages, and the many complex literary devices carefully placed throughout the epic, the true effects of Tolson’s writing, combined with the literary movements at the time, was the true creator of its poetic effects. 

As a class, we grappled with some of those themes: the archival nature of the work (to preserve the African history without harmful bias), the literary assimilation as a modernist (whether Libretto was distinctly read as a “poem” or a “Black poem”), and the cultural transcendence (where the use of various cultural texts and examples creates a unified perspective on the world). However, to better understand the peculiarity and complexity of Tolson’s Libretto, we must look at the complex context that it was formed under. A few points are critical to this understanding: the lack of “period” that Tolson’s Libretto falls under, the Afro-futurist and modernist goal of Tolson, and the broader social differences in his writing and beliefs. Tolson’s Libretto represents the microenvironment created by the pressures of dominant Western literary critics to create a modernist work that accurately expresses the identity of Liberia and the Black poet.

It’s important to understand that many of Tolson’s “major” works aren’t placed with the Harlem Renaissance, as they were created after he had left the literary scene. Although they contain the influences of the Harlem Renaissance, the literary period of the 1950s and 60s falls in the uncomfortable space of a period between the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement (in fact, the issue of periodization of literature, particularly African American Literature–our whole class–is a widely conversed issue in how we interpret and teach literary works). Tolson grew up in Missouri and taught primarily in Texas; his interaction with the Harlem Renaissance community came from his education at Columbia University, where he wrote his thesis on Harlem poetry, documenting and interviewing numerous figures of the Harlem Renaissance, completed in 1940. But Libretto falls far past this age of Tolson’s literary exploration, as it was worked on between 1947 to 1953. The lengthy time that Tolson spent writing Libretto as the Poet Laureate for Liberia (there’s also no actual record of him visiting Liberia ever!) created much of the verbal thickets featured in Tolson’s writing. The difficulty with attaching Libretto to a specific literary period to African American Literature leaves Tolson’s work up to the scrutiny of both modern analysts and the contemporary critics, without a specific movement to uphold the radical style and values that Tolson explores. The difficult placement of Tolson’s work contextually with other literary pieces means that the writers and students reading and understanding his work had few strands to hold onto. University classes who were reading Tolson’s work at the time had the same issues with unpacking its meanings as we did.

Tolson explored themes that had not been prominently applied to Black poetry – he created a prototype that served more so as an example and proof of concept rather than easily dissectable poetry, which garnered criticism by shallow analyses at the time. modernism as a genre was not very close with the African American literary movement – there were few individuals who ventured to combine them like Tolson. In our lesson, we dove into how Tolson alluded to many great works from different cultures to formulate his narrative, which was representative of techniques developed by modernists. The issue, however, is that Tolson’s nearly three decades late to the party. We discussed how Tolson was prefaced by Allen Tate, where:

“For the first time, it seems to me, a Negro poet has assimilated completely the full poetic language of his time and, by implication, the language of the Anglo-American poetic tradition.”

We analyzed how Tate’s interpretation of Tolson’s writing links to the Cullen and Hughes debate (of which Tolson was very knowledgeable about). It’s important to note that Tolson had actually asked for Tate to write his preface. At this time, many modernist writers participated in a new form of literary criticism, aptly named “New Criticism” that essentially analyzed a poem as if it were written in a vacuum. No outside context or biographical information would be used, and rather, modernists focused on the literary devices and language they used to create significance. That yields the curt understanding of Tolson’s Libretto by Tate, where indeed, Tolson indulges in the same styles of Western modernism. However, Tate’s analysis misses the broader implication of Tolson’s writing. Tolson wrote for the vertical audience (which was touched on briefly in the lesson, if you remember), where he wrote for the perspectives across time. He used the opportunity as Poet Laureate to create a work that could be a testament to the conversion of Western modernist conventions into a uniquely Afro-modernist style. While Tate and many critics of both White and Black identities summarize Tolson’s work as conforming to modernist ideals, in reality, he uses the modernist principle to create. And rightfully so, as Libretto serves as the bridge from Western hegemonic ideals of modernism to an Afro-futurist perspective.

In a way, Tolson’s writing could be seen as “ahead of his time”. But is it? Because arguably, his goal of writing Libretto in its complex nature was to introduce the modernist aesthetic to Black ones. But since it had created such an esoteric nature that both reminisced on recognizable patterns from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and created new narratives that weren’t easily recognized by the members of his community, Tolson garnered plenty of criticism from both modernist literary critics and the African American literary community. Tolson, as the Poet Laureate of Liberia, had created an epic poem that couldn’t be easily understood by the majority of Liberians and African Americans. Tolson’s work was ignored for a long period of time because of these conflicts until the turn of the century, when he became more recognized for the significance and depth of his works. However, I believe that the criticisms that Tolson faced represent a broader theme and question that faces African American writers. Tolson experimented, but his morphing of Western techniques into an Afro-futurist message was criticized immensely because the modernist systems that he employed weren’t understood well to his community, and the Western modernists almost mocked him for his repeating of work established by Western poets decades ago. Tolson wanted to bridge the gap between Western poetry and African American ones (this theme directly matches the cultural examples that are explored in the second “Do” section, that despite cultural differences, humans and civilizations have a lot in common, and that understanding can resolve our conflicts). However, in doing so, Tolson was isolated from his community and the modernist poets he had jokingly tried to impress (Arna Bontemps had recalled that Tolson joked, when he published Libretto, that “he would ‘write so many foreign words and footnotes that they would have to pay him some mind!’”). The broader questions that Tolson and many writers had to ask themselves is what their community is and what it means to write or create “new” styles.

For some more expert sources on the Tolson’s unique placement between modernism and African American literature, check out these sources that I used to help me write this blog!

Aldon L. Nielsen. “Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 1992, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3041835.pdf.

Andy Hines. “Vehicles of Periodization: Melvin B. Tolson, Allen Tate, and the New Critical Police.” Criticism, vol. 59, no. 3, 2017, p. 417. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.59.3.0417.

Chinitz, David E., and Gail McDonald, editors. “Melvin Tolson.” A Companion to Modernist Poetry, with Kathy Lou Schultz, 1st ed., Wiley, 2014. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118604427.

Dejong. “Affect and Diaspora: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 45, no. 3, 2014, p. 110. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.45.3.110.

Gruesser, John Clllen. “The Promise of Africa-To-Be in Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.” Black on Black, University Press of Kentucky, 2000, JSTOR, pp. 120–34, http://www.jstor.org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/stable/j.ctt130jjk3.9. Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa.