Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael Bérubé

SOURCE: "Masks, Margins, and African American Modernism: Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery," in PMLA, Vol. 105, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 57-69.

In the following essay, Bérubé discusses Tolson's work in relation to African-American modernism.

Harlem Gallery has been alternately celebrated and castigated for its formal difficulty—when, that is, it has been read at all. Yet although the poem is as formidable as any hypertextual text produced by the throes of modernism—saving Finnegans Wake—there seems something amiss in the idea that its difficulty should be a significant issue in itself; surely, by now, allusive, elliptical poetry should not be grounds for controversy. Still, even if the grounds are questionable, they are by no means powerless. Readers have apparently found the poem so generally inaccessible that publishers have followed suit and rendered it literally inaccessible, for even in the midst of the current revolution in African American letters, Harlem Gallery has quietly...
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