[Baraka's] poems and plays have explored the subjective effects of the dominant whites' violation of black mentality, and at the same time have acted out psychologically and in fantasy the politics of intransigeant confrontation. No American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action. That is not necessarily a good thing. When the reciprocity comes out of the very nature of the language and feeling that engage the poet, when it amounts to a discovery as of the awakening of the senses, then we have to do with an accomplishment whose moral and aesthetic character are inseparable values: as in Hamlet or Coriolanus or, less grandly, in Shelley's glorious chorus in Hellas: "The world's great age begins anew." In such work the quality of the poet's engagement with truth makes him incapable of using language dishonestly. But in part of "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" Baraka's political rhetoric cheapens his poem and dilutes its intended but merely contrived barbaric ferocity. His catalogue of names, for example, places Lumumba in the same category of race victims as characters in American comic strips and radio serials, nightclub performers, and prize-fighters, so that he weakens and at last loses the poem's original incantatory force.

Even in this poem, however,… Baraka has not betrayed himself entirely through an oversimplified rhetoric. He is the victim of his own best human qualities, a man who refuses to let himself slide out from under the burdens of less privileged black Americans. The psychological and political dangers of his position are obvious, for his own problems of poetic perspective are almost engulfed by the demands of his insistent militancy. Many of his poems are the deliberate invention of an intellectual poet setting out to internalize the violence of the poor blacks' experience and convert it into an equal and opposite reaction, and one just about as acceptable as a promise of national enlightenment. But in his best work he is guided by the subjective pressures underlying this process. (pp. 62-3)

It is easy to slip from the rigorous truthfulness of "An Agony. As Now." to the easy political tendentiousness of most of "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" and of the many imitations of Baraka's work by younger black poets. Understanding the poetic problems involved is essential to do something more sustained in its achievement than Baraka has yet done. (p. 64)