Prior to 1967, Miss Brooks' poetry was widely heralded for its lyricism and technical virtuosity. But, when a critic of the stature of J. Saunders Redding favorably compared Annie Allen to a work by Cellini …, he was actually saying many things: First, that she had successfully become a luxury, to be savored by an élite whose training and money afforded them the leisure to peruse her; and second, that she had, with equal success, imposed one of the finest sensibilities of the twentieth century upon a group of values and ideas which, more often than not, were predicated upon white superiority and Black inferiority.

In the case of Miss Brooks' work, it is not simply the internalization of the idea that white is beautiful and Black ugly…. Rather, it is the imposition of an essentially Christian system of values upon the actions of her characters. What has always been most devastating for Blacks about the aspect of Christianity with which they were indoctrinated was its emphasis upon the ideas of forgiveness and salvation through love…. [Anger], rage, the desire to kill, even when one is being killed, are, in the Christian frame of reference, "bad." A "good" person does not even think such things. Yet, in reality, it is these very forces, when channelled, which enable men to throw off oppression.

It is this Christianized sensibility, then, which, in the past, determined Miss Brooks' understanding of action and motivation of the people she described, and which, ultimately, affected the meaning of her poems. Although sympathetic, compassionate, even forgiving, towards her subjects, she never probes too deeply into the "why" of things. Thus, when critics celebrated her "universality" and her ability to "write from the heart," their accolades must be held suspect: One can sympathize with the lowly, muzzled by their own lowliness; one is terrified by rage seeking an outlet.

Since the publication of In the Mecca (1968), Miss Brooks has increasingly turned her eye to the nationalist impulse in Black life. Subsequent volumes Riot (1969), and Family Pictures (1970), are chronicles of the movement of Blacks towards a new assertiveness as a result of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the Sixties. Miss Brooks' latest volume of poems, Beckonings …, is both part of, yet different from, the newer group. It forms a continuum in that her subject remains the nationalist movement. However, where the earlier two books reflected the vitality and optimism of the Sixties, these poems are saturated with disillusionment and questioning, caused by the dissension of the Seventies. (pp. 52, 87)

[Something of a private tiredness is suggested] in "Horses Graze," whose major theme is a longing for harmony as it seems to exist in the natural world. (This is perhaps the least successful poem in the volume. In drawing imagery and rhythms from the idealized world of children, the poet discredits her own, very adult longing for simplicity and order.)

Underlying all of the poems in Beckoning is a deeply feminine sensibility whose need for stability, order, and beauty—for those emotional forces which give continuity to life—is being sorely tested by the chaos and strife it finds around it. However, the fact that Miss Brooks has joined the battle for the duration is beyond question, for one hears, beneath the questionings and disillusionment, hints of a different music, as though she were forging, from a place to which she alone is privy, the rhythms of a new song, of a new and imminent laughter. (p. 88)