The practical lessons of poetic composition are widely displayed in [The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown], and though the content is moving, often focusing on characters locked in mortal struggle of life and limb in the name of those heroic values, dignity and equality and great sacrifice, Brown's consciousness and conscientiousness of craft and technique are experimental, innovative, and deepened in a wide body of formal undertakings in the nature and balance of the artistic act. His poems are made, born of vision and revision, as a sculptor chisels, and Brown does, or a painter paints; biography is not poetry, but poetry demands a life fully lived—the poem is the performance. Sterling Brown's sense of design, of composition as a rigorous discipline, instructs and informs and extends a continuous consciousness of history and literary form. His own heroic ideal—been down so long that down don't worry me—is an abiding commitment to the word made flesh. His poetry teaches in the sense that it illustrates a clarity and precision of form as the skeletal structure of the expressive designs of language, and that language has a purity of diction because the poet's selectivity is the voice of authority—he controls the atmosphere, cadence, and pace of utterance, activating the landscape and voicings of the poem, while disarming his reader, his hearer. Brown's poems are deceptively literate; they move as images created and controlled as activation, as an agency of contact; in this sense he is a great poet of community. Brown's world is grounded in his perceptual faith in the long haul, and in the spirit which needs no hiding. (p. xi)