Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.: Complete Poems

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.: Complete Poems brings together for the first time all the poems of an accomplished African-American poet of the years just preceding the 1920s renaissance in black American literature. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1895, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., was a precocious child, reared in a strong family tradition of poetry. His father, a local educator, wrote poetry himself, and the family maintained a close friendship with the prominent poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Encouraged by this environment, Cotter displayed literary leanings from an early age. As his father recalled, Keats was his son's favorite poet among the many writers in their extensive family library: "He never tired of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.'" After completing high school, Cotter attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, for two years until he contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return home. Cotter then wrote almost incessantly--and published one collection of poetry, The Band of Gid