Skip to main content

By comparing the artistic and aesthetic strategies of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) with Melvin Tolson (1898-1966), this paper argues that the strategies and approaches in monumental and visionary works by minoritized and ghettoized modernist poets situate music, art, and aesthetics at the critical center of discourses involving culture, history, and civilization, and furthermore that their oracular and mystical approaches to art and music produced radically inclusive ways of valorizing the ancient past.

Born Gibran Khalil Gibran within the Lebanese bounds of the Ottoman Empire, at the age of twelve he immigrated to Boston with his mother and siblings. His studies returned him temporarily to the Mediterranean, and found him in Beirut (1897-1901); Greece, Italy, Spain, and France (1902). In Paris, he studied painting. After returning to the United States upon the death of his sister, he made his way back again to Paris (1908-1910). Having first published a book titled On Music (1905) in Arabic (al-Musiqa) in New York, Gibran continued writing in his native tongue until he settled in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and published his first book in English—The Madman (1911). By the time of his death 20 years later, he had become a literary celebrity in both the Old and New Worlds.

Born in Moberly, Missouri to a Methodist minister and seamstress, Melvin Beaunorus Tolson grew up with a reverend father who studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and instilled in him a love of knowledge, erudition, and education. An alumnus of Fisk University and a graduate of Lincoln University (1923), Tolson went on to teach English at Wiley College for more than two decades (1924-1947). Starting in 1930 Tolson took a leave of absence from teaching in order to pursue a Master’s degree at Columbia University. Although Tolson had never before been academically affiliated outside Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), his time as a student in New York City had a profound effect on him. Exposed the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance at its peak, Tolson devoted his Master’s research to a project titled “The Harlem Group of Negro Writers.”

By deploying the classicist’s tools to produce contextualized comparative readings of Gibran’s Jesus, the Son of Man (1928) and Tolson’s Harlem Gallery (1965), this paper strives to synthesize and articulate the aesthetics of marginal modernist poetry. Both Gibran and Tolson intervened in the 20th-century tradition of American letters, and critically before the Civil Rights Movement, to write themselves and marginalized subjectivities like theirs—as immigrant and African American, respectively—into a more comprehensive vision of human history, culture, and civilization that canonizes itself in correspondence with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Ultimately, from analysis of the common interest and attention Gibran and Tolson devote to music, art, mysticism, and prophecy in their works, this paper demonstrates that material and aesthetic cultures have throughout the 20th Century historically held pride of place in the discourses of intellectuals from non-dominant groups who sought to rewrite the way we understand prehistory and who conceived a radically more inclusive vision of Antiquity.