User:Natsanabria/Martha Gruening

Works[edit]
Martha Gruening's poetry reflected her progressive social views. Prior to the U.S.’s involvement in WWI, a campaign arose, coined the Preparedness Campaign. This campaign sought to strengthen the U.S. military and gain public support to send troops into war. To foster discussion over U.S. military intervention and patriotism, The Masses, a magazine that ran from 1911 to 1917 that was focused on socialist politics and art, invited socialist thinkers to share their thoughts on patriotism. Martha Gruening responded with a poem she titled Prepared. It is a one stanza poem that asserts the narrative voice of an American. The narrator reflects on their current freedom to commit any sort of act and decides that violence is a just defense of their freedoms. Gruening provides insight into her idea of patriotism, indicating that she condemns the parading of the word by a society whose actions do not promote liberty and justice, but instead commits acts that prevent them.

During the Harlem Renaissance, many important figures spoke out about their opinions on the movement and its achievements for African American culture. Martha Gruening, in her essay Negro Renaissance (1932), discusses her thoughts on the state of the movement and some of the more constructive writings that came about. Though Gruening believed that achievement had been made by the movement, she admits that it had been “...ballyhooed and exploited commercially and socially…”.Gruening also mentions Alain Locke’s idea of a “common consciousness” and that though many of the works produced during the Harlem Renaissance exhibited this, Gruening wrote that there seemed more individual works or works of a “definite consciousness”. Despite this, Gruening adds that Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter and Willa Cather’s My Antonia are a constructive expression of African American writers as they are both stories where “...Color is an added element”, that they are not just stories about families of Color. Gruening states that these stories share a “radiant sanity” and that though hardships and poverty are present in both, they are “dominated by a triumphant vitality”. Gruening saw the benefit of works that showcased mundane, but genuine, stories written by African Americans, as opposed to other works where authors seemed to “conform to white standards”.