About poet Melvin B. Tolson?

Question

I need to know what was his perception of the world i cant seem to put it all together an i have a paper do help please

Answer 1

This is a very good site on modern American poetry, with interesting links on Tolson's poetry:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/tolson/tolson.htm

Answer 2

Read this article:

"Poetic Proverbs,African Advocacy,and Melvin B. Tolson"
By Michelle Toumayants



Words from Africa and Europe, Asia and the Americas fill the pages of a small volume. An excerpt from Shakespeare, allusions toCullen, Dryden, and Raleigh, references to Nietzsche and Goethe wend their waythrough the first eighteen lines of an ode to a burgeoning African nation.Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, masterwork of Melvin B. Tolson,opens with a characteristic intellectual intensity that threatens to over-whelm its reader with a cacophony of voices, languages, and literatures.This poem, commissioned by the president of Liberia for the nation’s cen-tennial celebration in 1947, elicits ceaseless comparisons with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its myriad footnotes and use of languages such asUrdu, Egyptian, French, Swahili, and Japanese. Many have observedTolson’s erudite and seemingly sophistic style, and have questioned hismethod of attaining his self-professed goal—that of speaking to his fellow discrimination (Russell 3). Some critics have accused Tolson of sacrificinghis goal in favor of garnering acclaim, pointing at Libretto’s (and his otherpoems’) voluminous footnotes and difficult vocabulary. This, they say, is aman writing for the “literary caviar” (Russell 9). This author would like tocounter that argument by pointing at another device Tolson employs inLibretto: the African proverb. A comparison of the structure, usage, andpurpose of the proverb and Tolson’s poetry will show that Tolson is notwriting for the elite; rather, this intellectual is ever-mindful of the massesand uses the common proverb as a model for his poetry, and also as aweapon against prejudice.Libretto for the Republic of Liberia is divided into eight sections,each designated by one of the eight notes of the diatonic scale. Tolson devotes eighty-four lines of the section “Sol” to African proverbs, proverbs from various continental locations, proverbs with varied connotations.

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