While "Tired" has been frequently anthologized, Johnson's earlier poems were made in more "conventional modes", including dialect poetry, as found in his first book, A Little Dreaming. The collection considered a wide range of topics, from a poem on Paul Laurence Dunbar, entitled "Dunbar", to medieval themes such as in "Lancelot’s Defiance".Johnson, Fenton, A Little Dreaming (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, 1997). Additionally, A Little Dreaming contains a customary Scottish poem, Irish poem, and even Yiddish poem, which points to a whole range of poetic influences during the early part of his poetic career. In Visions of the Dusk and Songs of the Soil, Johnson begins to incorporate "Negro spirituals", and here the transition into themes more heavily influenced by the African-American experience might be observed. In Songs of the Soil, Johnson writes that "The Negro has a history, and it is something more than a peasant." Transitioning from here to the poem "Tired", we might find the "black revolutionary poet" that James Weldon Johnson proclaims Fenton Johnson to be and how many perceive him today.
