Incident

“My Heart Leaps Up” by William Wordsworth (1807)

William Wordsworth is one of the foundational poets of English Romanticism, a literary movement that focused on emotion, creativity, and nature as worthy subjects for poetry. This poem is grounded in the marvelous image of a rainbow and the speaker’s realization that the wonder he felt as a child is the same wonder he feels in the present moment as he looks at another rainbow. The speaker concludes that “[t]he Child is father of the Man” (Line 7). This poem shares with “Incident” the idea that the past and memory have a powerful influence on identity. Unlike the speaker in the Wordsworth poem, the speaker in “Incident” loses their sense of wonder in the face of racism.

“To John Keats, Poet. At Spring Time (For Carl Van Vechten) (Spring, 1924)” by Countee Cullen (1925)

Published in the same collection as “Incident,” this poem shows the influence of important Romantic poet John Keats on Cullen. The speaker presents themselves as the heir to John Keats, one who is able to use creativity to see something new in spring, the subject of many Romantic poems.

“Nikki-Rosa” by Nikki Giovanni (1968)