Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Senghor, Léopold Sédar - Gwendolyn Brooks （review date 13 September 1964）

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Gwendolyn Brooks （review date 13 September 1964）

SOURCE: “Singing Love Songs to a Continent,” in New York Herald Tribune Book Week, September 13, 1964, p. 18.

[In the following review, Brooks offers positive assessment of Senghor's Selected Poems.]

Leopold Sedar Senghor, President of the Republic of Senegal, says that he is black. He enjoys the fact. Beyond the simple certainty, he feels, is humanity—to which blackness, brownness, whiteness, yellowness must be secondary.

His I-am-a-black-man, broadcast in a heat-suffused voice, is not a defensive claim. He invites the world to audit his negritude, because the world seems interested. But he does not whine, he does not pant for alms or pity. For what is there, he would ask, in or under his skin that requires these nuisances? He does regret the chasms between man and man and he does rather believe that creative and public exchange is going to be possible.

As blazing...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Newsweek （review date 27 July 1964）
   2. Gwendolyn Brooks （review date 13 September 1964）
   3. Robert W. July （review date 25 October 1964）
   4. O. R. Dathorne （essay date 1974）
   5. Lilyan Kesteloot （essay date 1974）
   6. Frederick Ivor Case （essay date 1975）
   7. Janis L. Pallister （essay date April 1980）
   8. Dorothy S. Blair （essay date 1984）
   9. Janet G. Vaillant （essay date 1990）
   10. Roger Shattuck and Samba Ka （review date 20 December 1990）
   11. K. Anthony Appiah （review date 5 July 1992）
   12. Isaac I. Elimimian （essay date 1994）
   13. Koffi Anyinefa （essay date Summer 1996）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. African Literature