cummings), sonnets (filtered through Countee Cullen and Claude McKay), and hymns (filtered through Dickinson indeed, truly remarkably so, as in “Priscilla Assails the Sepulchre of Love”: “I can’t unlock my eyes because / my body will come through / And cut her every clothing off / And drive herself to you”). allusion: here as often to contemporary events as to texts compression: obliquity or ambiguity especially arising from the pressurizing of syntax and reprisal of traditional forms: ballads (filtered through Langston Hughes and e.e.

Techniques, mainly Modernist, informing the work include: personae: Eliotic “impersonality,” etc. It was more overtly politicized about race, class and gender than her earlier work at the same time, it was not yet directed more exclusively towards a black audience, but continued her engagement with literary structures linked with the white canon of the generation before. Met with proverbial “mixed reviews” (from a mixed audience), the book was pivotal in Brooks’ oeuvre. For instance, in “Strong Men, Riding Horses,” Brooks writes an assessment of the white masculinity on display in 1950s Westerns, over against her own chameleon-poet subject position: “what my mouths remark / To word-wall off that broadness of the dark / Is pitiful. And they are courageous, despite slant-stated sentiments to the contrary. This is perhaps a result of the artfulness with which she constructed her poems as rhetorical portals: “Black and female are basic and inherent in her poetry,” Hortense Spillers notes, while (particularly before the mid-sixties) “e cannot always say with grace or ease that there is a direct correspondence between the issues of her poetry and her race and sex.” The Bean Eaters in particular deserves attention and interpretation - its poems are layered, sometimes involuted, and also sometimes deceptively simplistic a bit macabre emphatically intellectual but with a practical bent simultaneously abstract and concrete, like Stevens, but without the whimsy socially penetrating and outspoken, minus pedagoguery. I’ll begin with vehement restatement: Gwendolyn Brooks is an under-read and under-understood great poet of the twentieth century.

Gwendolyn brooks poems about race