With the publication of Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson claimed a major role for Afro-American poets in the modernist literary revolution forged principally by such poets as Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Libretto for the Republic of Liberia marked a dramatic change in poetic technique from Tolson's previous poetry, although in retrospect one can see many premonitory signals of this change. In mid career Tolson assumed the modernist revolution in literature was irreversible. For him the New Criticism, which sees a text as a "verbal icon," was an acknowledgment of a prior and more fundamental literary revolution. Thus, Tolson became an enthusiastic spokesman for accepting modernist literary tenets, although he was careful and definite about retaining a marked distinction between his own social and political views and the conservative views of many of the leading spokesmen...