Miss Brooks writes tense, complex, rhythmic verse that contains the metaphysical complexities of John Donne and the word magic of Appollinaire, Eliot, and Pound…. [Her style], however, is often used to explicate the condition of the black American trapped behind a veil that separates him from the white world. What one seems to have is "white" style and "black" content—two warring ideals in one dark body. (p. 43)

The real duality appears when we realize that Gwendolyn Brooks—though praised and awarded [by the world of white arts and letters]—does not appear on the syllabi of most American literature courses, and her name seldom appears in the annual scholarly bibliographies of the academic world. It would seem she is a black writer after all, not an American writer. Yet when one listens to the voice of today's black-revolutionary consciousness, one often hears that Miss Brooks's early poetry fits the white, middle-class patterns Imamu Baraka has seen as characteristic of "Negro literature."

When one turns to her canon, one finds she has abided the questions of both camps…. She has the Parnassian inspiration and the earth-mother characteristics noted by [Etheridge Knight]; her strength has come from a dedication to truth. The truth that concerns her does not amount to a facile realism or a heavy naturalism, though "realism" is the word that comes to mind when one reads a number of poems in A Street in Bronzeville (1945).

Poems, or segments, such as "kitchenette building," "a song in the front yard," and "the vacant lot," all support the view that the writer was intent on a realistic, even a naturalistic, portrayal of the life of lower-echelon urban dwellers…. If she had insisted on a strict realism and nothing more, she could perhaps be written off as a limited poet. But she is no mere chronicler of the condition of the black American poor. Even her most vividly descriptive verses contain an element that removes them from the realm of a cramped realism. All of her characters have both ratiocinative and imaginative capabilities; they have the ability to reason, dream, muse, and remember. This ability distinguishes them from the naturalistic literary victim caught in an environmental maze. From the realm of "raw and unadorned life" [for example], Satin-Legs Smith creates his own world of bright colors, splendid attire, and soft loves in the midst of a cheap hotel's odor and decay…. Gwendolyn Brooks's characters, in short, are infinitely human because at the core of their existence is the imaginative intellect.

Given the vision of such characters, it is impossible to agree with David Littlejohn, who wishes to view them as simplistic mouthpieces for the poet's sensibility [see CLC, Vol. 5]; moreover, it is not surprising that the characters' concerns transcend the ghetto life of many black Americans. They reflect the joy of childhood, the burdens and contentment of motherhood, the distortions of the war-torn psyche, the horror of blood-guiltiness, and the pains of the anti-hero confronted with a heroic ideal. Miss Brooks's protagonists, personae, and speakers, in short, capture all of life's complexities and particularly the complexity of an industrialized age characterized by swift change, depersonalization, and war. (pp. 44-6)

[Her work] joins the mainstream of twentieth-century poetry in its treatment of the terrors of war…. (p. 47)

War, however, is not the only theme that allies Gwendolyn Brooks with the mainstream…. In "Strong Men, Riding Horses," we have a Prufrockian portrait of the antihero…. In "Mrs. Small," one has a picture of the "Mr. Zeros" (or Willie Lomans) of a complex century, and in "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we have an evocation of the blood-guiltiness of the white psyche in an age of dying colonialism. Miss Brooks presents these themes with skill because she has the ability to endow each figure with a unique, individualizing vision of the world.

If they were considered in isolation, however, the characters and concerns of the verse would not mark the poet as an outstanding writer. Great poetry demands word magic, a sense of the infinite possibilities of language. In this technical realm Miss Brooks is superb. Her ability to dislocate and mold language into complex patterns of meaning can be observed in her earliest poems and in her latest volumes—In The Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), and Family Pictures (1970). The first lines of "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" are illustrative:

       INAMORATAS, with an approbation,
       Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination,
 
       He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat
       Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat
       And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed.

The handling of polysyllabics is not in the least strained, and the movement is so graceful that one scarcely notices the rhymed couplets. Time and again this word magic is at work, and the poet's varying rhyme schemes lend a subtle resonance that is not found in the same abundance in the works of other acknowledged American writers. It is important to qualify this judgment, however, for while Miss Brooks employs polysyllabics and forces words into striking combinations, she preserves colloquial rhythms. Repeatedly one is confronted by a realistic voice—not unlike that in Robert Frost's poetry—that carries one along the dim corridors of the human psyche or down the rancid halls of a decaying tenement. Miss Brooks's colloquial narrative voice, however, is more prone to complex juxtapositions than Frost's…. She fuses the most elaborate words into contexts that allow them to speak naturally or to sing beautifully her meaning.

Miss Brooks is not indebted to Frost alone for technical influences; she also acknowledges her admiration for Langston Hughes. Though a number of her themes and techniques set her work in the twentieth-century mainstream, there are those that place it firmly in the black American literary tradition. One of her most effective techniques is a sharp, black, comic irony that is closely akin to the scorn Hughes directed at the ways of white folks throughout his life. When added to her other skills, this irony proves formidable. (pp. 47-9)

The poet's chiding, however, is not always in the derisive mode. She often turns an irony of loving kindness on black Americans. "We Real Cool" would fit easily into the canon of Hughes or Sterling Brown…. The irony is patent [here], but the poet's sympathy and admiration for the folk are no less obvious…. Miss Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, "The Bean Eaters," and "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat" likewise reveal the employment of kindly laughter to veil the tears of a desperate situation. (pp. 49-50)

Finally, there are the poems of protest. A segregated military establishment comes under attack in both "The Negro Hero" and "the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men."… And in poems like "Riders to the Blood-red Wrath" and "The Second Sermon on the Warpland," Miss Brooks expresses the philosophy of militant resistance that has characterized the black American literary tradition from the day a black slave first sang of Pharaoh's army. The poet, in short, has spoken forcefully against the indignities suffered by black Americans in a racialistic society. Having undertaken a somewhat thorough revaluation of her role as a black poet in an era of transition, she has stated and proved her loyalty to the task of creating a new consciousness in her culture…. She has mediated the dichotomy that left Paul Laurence Dunbar … a torn and agonized man. Of course, she had the example of Dunbar, the Harlem Renaissance writers, and others to build upon, but at times even superior talents have been incapable of employing the accomplishments of the past for their own ends. Unlike the turn-of-the-century poet and a number of Renaissance writers, Miss Brooks has often excelled the surrounding white framework, and she has been able to see clearly beyond it to the strengths and beauties of her own unique cultural tradition.

Gwendolyn Brooks represents a singular achievement. Beset by a double consciousness, she has kept herself from being torn asunder by crafting poems that equal the best in the black and white American literary traditions. Her characters are believable, her themes manifold, and her technique superb. The critic (whether black or white) who comes to her work seeking only support for his ideology will be disappointed for, as Etheridge Knight pointed out, she has ever spoken the truth. And truth, one likes to feel, always lies beyond the boundaries of any one ideology. Perhaps Miss Brooks's most significant achievement is her endorsement of this point of view. From her hand and fertile imagination have come volumes that transcend the dogma on either side of the American veil. (pp. 50-1)