User:Eloquentelephant/sandbox

Spencer's poems spoke to race, nature, and the harsh realities of the world that she lived in. Her work would go on to be widely anthologized. Spencer's career as a poet began in 1919, when she was planning to open a chapter of the NAACP in Lynchburg. Anne Spencer hosted James Weldon Johnson in her home, as a traveling representative for the NAACP. It was during this visit in 1919 that Johnson discovered Anne's poetry, and working through H.L. Mencken, Johnson's own editor, Anne had her first poem, "Before the Feast at Shushan," published in the February 1920 issue of The Crisis. She was 40 years old at the time her first poem was published.

The majority of Spencer's work was published during the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance. Her work was highly respected during her time, and through her poems, she was able to touch on topics of race and nature, as well as themes of feminism. For instance, critics interpret her poem "White Things" to be a comparison of the subjugation of the black race to the despoliation of nature. Her work was notably featured in Alain Locke's famous anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which connected her to the lifeline of the Harlem Renaissance, despite the fact that she lived in Virginia, far from New York. In addition, her poems were included in The Book of American Negro Poetry, which was edited by another figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson. During her lifetime, Spencer was able to publish over 30 poems. She earned herself a place in the esteemed Norton Anthology of American Poetry for her writing, making her the second African American to be featured in this work. After her death in 1975, much of her work was published in Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry. She was later featured in Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. In the later half of the twentieth century, much of Spencer’s lost work was found and published by other famous poets.