The Lost Baby Poem

American writer, poet, and playwright Langston Hughes discovered Lucille Clifton after their introduction by another writer named Ishmael Reed. Hughes was a massive American literary figure, an early innovator of jazz poetry, and a leader in the Harlem Renaissance. The movement known as the Harlem Renaissance took place primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the early 1900s, but it included Black American artists, writers, and creators from all over the United States, and was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, and politics. Hughes published some of Clifton’s work in his anthology The Poetry of the Negro, situating her work within the canon of post-Harlem Renaissance African American literature and solidifying her name amongst literary giants like Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.

The Harlem Renaissance was crucial in the development of African American artistic identity and revolutionized the way Black Americans creatively expressed themselves. However, the tradition of African American literature stretches back much further than the early 1900s. Critics often agree it began during the pre-Revolutionary War period. African American literature often confronts, with uniquely penetrating insight, fraught issues like racial inequality, oppression, poverty, injustice, and trauma. Alongside its special depth of suffering, however, the canon of African American literature is rich with creativity, beauty, and immense hope against all odds. The literature often embodies deep pain and tremendous joy at the same time, illuminating more complex, less idealized perspectives on the American experience. Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” follows in the tradition of addressing controversial subjects, tackling abortion without any obvious political or moral agenda. The poem insists on two truths at once: what happened was terribly painful, but the speaker must persist in personal growth despite her past.