author
Edward Smyth Jones
b. 1881
Born in Mississippi to formerly enslaved parents, this early 20th-century poet wrote with steady craft and quiet determination. His work helped preserve a distinct voice in African American poetry during and beyond the Harlem Renaissance.
2 Audiobooks
The Sylvan Cabin: A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln, and Other Verse
by Edward Smyth Jones
Flag of the Free
by Edward Smyth Jones
About the author
Edward Smyth Jones was born in March 1881 in Natchez, Mississippi. He attended local schools and later studied for fourteen months at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1902–1903, working in exchange for tuition.
He moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he published his first poetry collection, The Rose that Bloometh in My Heart, in 1908. Jones became known as an African American poet whose work favored traditional verse forms rather than dialect poetry, and his poems appeared in important anthologies of Black writing from the period.
His life also included hardship: he spent time in jail after a charge of vagrancy, and that experience led to one of his best-known books, Poems of Four Years and Four Months in the Cage (1923). He died in September 1968, leaving behind a body of work that reflects persistence, faith in literature, and a determination to be heard.