SOURCE: "Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism," in African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 241-55.

In the following essay, Nielsen states that Tolson's works "are an assault upon Anglo-American modernism's territorial designs, but they have been little read."

"In 1932 I was a Negro poet writing Anglo-Saxon sonnets as a graduate student in an Eastern University"—these are the words that Melvin B. Tolson chose to describe himself as he had been at the outset of his odyssey as an artist, a description which, while recalling the formal beginnings of other modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams, resonates yet more profoundly with Frederick Douglass's recollections of his first interlinear strides towards freedom and a style of his own. But the interlinear tracings of both Douglass and Tolson soon began to diverge radically from their models. Not merely glosses, or even really copying, the writing between...