Margaret Danner (1915–1984) (Margaret Esse Danner, Margaret Danner Cunningham) was an American poet, editor and cultural activist known for her poetic imagery and her celebration of African heritage and cultural forms.
Early life and Chicago years
Born in 1915, Margaret Esse Danner came of age in Chicago during the Great Migration. Sources place her birth in Pryorsburg, Kentucky, in 1915, although she adamantly claimed Chicago as her birthplace. In eighth grade, she won first prize in a school contest for "The Violin", a poem describing Stradivarius and Guarnerius violins. Danner's college education included courses at Loyola University, Northwestern University, YMCA College, and the newly founded Roosevelt College. Perhaps equally significant was her education in the African-American cultural community of Chicago's South Side, which in the 1930s and 1940s harbored grassroots cultural institutions and informal circles devoted to politics, education, art and literature and often tied to the Communist Popular Front. Although Danner stayed detached from Communism and would eventually oppose all radical politics, she participated in various South Side groups, including Inez Cunningham Stark's poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center, along with Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Goss Burroughs, her "sometime friends (and rivals)." In 1946, Danner founded Art Associates to gather and promote Chicago's black writers and poets. She counted as friends the poet and critic Edward Bland, as well as Hoyt Fuller, who would head the revived Negro Digest (later Black World) beginning in 1951.
Danner attracted mentors outside the South Side, including the poets Paul Eagle and Karl Shapiro. She also struck up a correspondence with Langston Hughes that would continue until his death. In 1945, she wrote to Hughes: "My life as a poet looks very bleak to me now.... Only last night I read one of mine and was told it was elusive, ethereal etc. Not much help for my people in that sort of verse." She aimed "to inject some strength" into her work and to train her naturally delicate style to carry forceful messages of African-American pride and racial equality, what she called "the social conscious"
Poems such as "Etta Moten's Attic" and "Africa, Drifting Through Me Sings" demonstrate Danner's growing passion for black African arts, cultures and peoples in the 1940s and 1950s. She looked to National Geographic magazines, anthropology books and American museums for information and images. Professing "the power of the African pull to be stronger than Western Civilization in my psyche," Danner framed many of her poems around encounters with African art objects. She wrote in 1968, "I believe (and have tried for many years to do something positive about this conviction) that the Black should be awakened to his vast beauty."
Danner joined the staff of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse as an editorial assistant in 1951 and in 1956 became the first African American to serve as a Poetry assistant editor. "Far From Africa: Four Poems," which would become one of Danner's most anthologized works, appeared in Poetry in 1951 and earned her a John Hay Whitney fellowship for a trip to Africa, which she delayed until 1966. June M. Aldridge notes that Danner "recall[ed] the association with Poetry as one of the most rewarding experiences of her life." However, by the late 1950s, according to James Edward Smethurst, "Danner's career as a poet seemed to her stalled... perhaps in part due to her proclivity for intense emotional and intellectual crushes on individuals and near-paranoid fears of plots against her career."
Details of Danner's personal life are scarce. She first married Cordell Strickland, with whom she had one child, Naomi. Danner later remarried to Otto Cunningham.