More than twenty-five years ago, in 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks listed three "impressive advantages" possessed by black poets: subjects that are "moving, authoritative and humane"; "great drive"; and "inspiriting emotion, like tied hysteria." She voiced her fear, however, that precisely because of these advantages, the poets might yield to the temptation to substitute them, with "no embellishment, no interpretation, no subtlety," for art…. [But, says Brooks]:

… no real artist is going to be content with offering raw materials. The Negro poet's most urgent duty, at present, is to polish his technique, his way of presenting his truths and his beauties, that these may be more insinuating, and, therefore, more overwhelming.

Never content herself with "offering raw materials," Brooks has, for almost half a century, followed her own dictum by producing poetry marked both by power and by polished technique.

One example is "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock," first published in The Bean Eaters (1960)…. The occasion for the poem, the integration of Little Rock's Central High School in the fall of 1957, certainly contained "raw materials" in abundance; skillfully Brooks turned these elements into artistry.

Immediately striking is Brooks's use of contrasting images. In the first stanza of the poem, for example, the activities of the people of Little Rock are dichotomized: people bear babes, enabling the continuation of life itself, while tending to the trivialities of everyday living…. (p. 32)

The center of the poem, thematically and literally (lines 27-36 of sixty lines), is the seventh stanza, the most abstract and the most complex division of the work. Before and after this section, most of the images are concrete, while in these middle lines there is not one concrete picture. The intentional ambiguities here intensify the contrast-identity pattern of the earlier sections….

In these richly evocative lines … cluster concepts of heraldry and pageantry, romance, honor, purity, and rightness—called up by oblique references to the Confederacy and its emblems.

Stanza eight emphasizes the willingness of the people in Little Rock to suffer boredom, bother, and fuzziness with grace, politeness, and affection—simply because life must not be rejected. Hence the reporter, perplexed, cannot write down the story he and his editor had expected him to find in Little Rock, a story of evil whites and saintly blacks. The story he does find he dares not submit: "They are like people everywhere." There is no denying the violence and the racism in Little Rock; he has seen people behaving with cruelty—"hurling spittle, rock, / Garbage and fruit." Even in the description of these ugly activities, however, the images suggest both contrast and identification. The hate is expressed in images of ugly movement … but this violence appears on faces characteristically calm, serene, the faces of "bright madonnas." (p. 33)

The controlling pattern of contrast and identification is integrated with the structure and the rhythm of the poem. Although the arrangement of lines in stanzas is, on first reading, apparently random, closer attention reveals that the work falls into three broad divisions which are in many ways different from one another and yet are subtly alike. The first eighteen lines constitute the first section. These lines, subdivided into five short stanzas, are unified by the meter and by rhyme. The meter is iambic tetrameter [and is generally] regular…. (pp. 33-4)

The second division, lines 19-41, provides a contrast. This section is not metrical: line length ranges from three syllables to eighteen, with no pattern of accents. Nor is a rhyme scheme discernible here.

Then the last nineteen lines (42-60) recall the form of the first section while echoing the middle division in some ways. Iambic feet once again dominate—but here with a greater degree of muting, of intentional softening, provided by occasional additions and substitutions….

Hence, although the three sections are not identical—and the middle one is quite different—they are skillfully woven together by repetition of meter and rhyme. And all of these elements—imagery, sound, structure, meter, rhyme—operate together to complement, to intensify, the idea that while there are enormous differences between Southern blacks and whites, both share a basic humanness.

A newspaper columnist, writing in 1974, commented that the South "suffers from two mythologies. One is self-created—the idea of a vanished golden age of cavaliers and belles, elegance in the mansions and happy young (and black) folks rollin' on the little cabin floor…. The second is the mythology of movies and TV—the South of bigots, sadists and redneck sheriffs …". Brooks's fictional reporter seems to have gone to Little Rock expecting the latter mythology; he encounters Southerners who try to believe in the former. What he discovers, however, is a truth that is neither—merely that the South is inhabited by people.

Certain admirers of Gwendolyn Brooks may argue that the theme of this poem is not typical of her work since 1967. They could cite her increasing militancy, her trip to Africa, her association with the Broadside Press, and her statement that today's black "is understood by no white. Not the wise white; not the Schooled white; not the Kind white" as evidence that she no longer believes in the essential commonality of black and white. All of this may be true. Equally true, however, is the poet's achievement of artistry, tightly structured, polished, powerful. In "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock" Brooks has not taken the easy way out, the easy way of "offering raw materials." (p. 34)