Black Saturation: Selected Works of Stephen E. Henderson

Committed to developing frameworks for defining and evaluating Black poetry, literary scholar Stephen E. Henderson (1925-1997) examined the question: What makes a poem Black? In his critical approach, Henderson prioritized form but not at the expense of source, function, or context, and, in so doing, developed convincing theoretical frameworks for examining African American lyric expressions, especially that of Black Arts poets. Black Saturation: Selected Works of Stephen E. Henderson is designed to expand and enrich understandings of Henderson’s critical corpus by showcasing many of his most essential essays, presentations, and syllabi in a standalone volume.

Henderson deftly conceptualized the ways in which aesthetic innovations were interwoven with revolutionary exigencies--a marriage of poetry and politics that became a hallmark of the 1960s and ’70s. While other critics often ignored or fumbled to construct an adequate rubric for evaluating and celebrating Black Arts poetry--penned by Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Mari Evans, Sarah Webster Fabio, Haki Madhubuti, and Larry Neal, among many others--Henderson constellated a triad of interdependent characteristics (structure, theme, and saturation) through which he examined Black literature in general and poetry in particular.

Revisiting Henderson’s scholarship in the third decade of the twenty-first century allows us, on the one hand, to further appreciate his imprint on current scholarship about Black literature, especially poetry, and, on the other, to introduce contemporary students and scholars to his salient theoretical frameworks, not to mention his persuasive critical style.

Hazel Arnett Ervin is author of African American Literary Criticism, The Handbook of African American Literature, and several books on Ann Petry’s biography, bibliography, and criticism. E. Ethelbert Miller is author of the poetry baseball trilogy, If God Invented Baseball, When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, and How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask. Phillip M. Richards is associate professor of English at Colgate University. He is author of Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters, and he contributed to Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society. Emily Ruth Rutter is associate dean of the Honors College and professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, published by University Press of Mississippi, and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.