Today’s Poem: Life-long, Poor Browning

Anne Spencer imagines Robert Browning in a heaven that looks like Virginia

Anne Spencer’s garden retreat (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Life-Long, Poor Browning,”  breathes the air of the Virginia garden house where the poet Anne Spencer (1882–1975) retreated to write. Spencer, one of three African-American women included in the 1973 Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, strikes a unique note among the voices of the Harlem Renaissance, as a nature poet with Romantic sympathies. After a free-ranging childhood in the West Virginia mountains, she spent her married life in a colorful Lynchburg house, home to a family of children and visited by such figures as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marian Anderson. Beyond the intellectual stimulation of these frequent guests, the beauties of the  large garden surrounding the house clearly informed Spencer’s poetic imagination. 

In “Life-Long, Poor Browning, Spencer claims the Victorian poet Robert Browning as her subject, with the authority of one who does not doubt her own place in the English …