A gifted and prolific poet, Angelina Weld Grimké belonged to a comparatively small but expanding circle of black American intellectuals. She was born and nurtured in an environment that differed markedly from that of most blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hers was a milieu of learning, sophistication, and encouragement to excel and to develop one's potential; thus she wrote poetry at an early age; a well-known protest play entitled Rachel, produced in 1916 and published in 1920; fiction, mostly short stories; book reviews; and general articles. Poetry, however, was the genre with which she began and the one to which she devoted much of her attention during her long life. It is also the genre in which she was the most talented.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Angelina Grimké was the only child of Archibald Henry and Sarah Stanley Grimké. Her unusual but distinguished...