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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Gwendolyn Brooks is an important voice in African American poetry, as the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first Black woman to serve as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (what is now the Poet Laureate position). According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:
Brooks offered a new fusion in African American poetry. Influenced by writers such as Hughes and by the high modernist tradition then epitomized perhaps by Robert Lowell, she moved as a poet between relative simplicity and [...] a complexity of prosody [or patterns of rhythm], learned allusion, and sustained irony (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2012. p. 23).
Renowned poet Langston Hughes was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, which focused on celebrating Black life and arts, such as dance, poetry, visual arts, fashion, and more. Hughes’s celebration of local Black communities and blues music can be seen in Brooks’s work.
Modernism is a concept that encompasses many philosophies and fields of art. Poetic modernism utilizes strong imagery and rejects formal constraints. The modernist tradition in which Brooks wrote included many allusions, or references, to other poems.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
Gwendolyn Brooks
A Sunset of the City
Gwendolyn Brooks
Boy Breaking Glass
Gwendolyn Brooks
Cynthia in the Snow
Gwendolyn Brooks
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
Gwendolyn Brooks
Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
Gwendolyn Brooks
The birth in a narrow room
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Blackstone Rangers
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Crazy Woman
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Mother
Gwendolyn Brooks
the rites for Cousin Vit
Gwendolyn Brooks
To Be in Love
Gwendolyn Brooks
To The Diaspora
Gwendolyn Brooks
Ulysses
Gwendolyn Brooks
We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks