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On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation - Review
MELUS, Fall, 1998 by Terence Allan Hoagwood
On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Edited by Stephen Caldwell Wright. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. xi + 277 pages.
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This collection reprints reviews and essays on "one of the most distinguished poets to appear in America during the twentieth century" (George Kent, "The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," 1971). Though problems in the editing diminish the book's value as a scholarly contribution (as I will explain below), this volume does reflect critical opinion and controversy over Brooks's work and its significant development from her first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1954), through a period of work in which racial, social, and political issues are treated more explicitly, as in the long poem that may represent her achievement in greatest magnitude, In the Mecca (1968), to the present, when (as Henry Taylor says in an essay that concludes this volume) "she is after larger historical scope," as in her books Winnie (1988) and Children Coming Home (1991). From the beginning, criticism of Brooks's poems has involved controversy about the relative importance of formal excellence, which several critics associate with white literary traditions and black political commitment. First the reviews and then critical essays are presented chronologically, rather than by theme or topic, but this division of opinion--which includes disputes about the (traditionally white) claims of universality as opposed to the social mission expressed by black people for black people--recurs throughout the critical history represented in this book.
Paul Engle's 1945 review of A Street in Bronzeville has been cited by later writers as a statement of predominately white values which Brooks later learned to oppose and to transcend: Engles says that "Miss Brooks is the first Negro poet to write wholly out of a deep and imaginative talent, without relying on the fact of color." J. Saunders Redding's review of Annie Allen blames Brooks's representation of racially specific experiences that only "another Negro can get" as "coterie stuff." Stanley Kunitz's review of Annie Allen finds Brooks's treatments "of caste and prejudice" to be uncertain but praises her "technical assurance." Voicing a different critical interest, Harvey Curtis Webster finds that "her best social poems yet" are in The Bean Eaters (1960); in contrast, Nick Aaron Ford wrote that The Bean Eaters "does not seem worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winner. (Brook's Annie Allen [1949] had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.) With a bluntness that was to evoke controversy, Louis Simpson expressed the traditionally white universalist view, writing in 1963 that "if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not important."
In opposition to that view, the appreciation of Brooks's work in relation to black activism was voiced by Addison Gayle, Jr., who wrote in 1972 of Brooks's coming to share with "young black poets" a determination "to create poetry that is more meaningful to black people." Following Brooks's account in her autobiography Report from Part One (1975), most critics date this interest in black activism and Afrocentric writing from Brooks's experience at a Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in 1967 and her involvement in the late sixties (including a poetry workshop) with a black teen gang in Chicago called the Blackstone Rangers. In 1971 Robert Farnsworth called her "a poet-reporter" with an "eye for the people and events of a black urban world pushed inward by white repression."
The essays reprinted in this volume develop more fully the controversy about formal excellence and black political commitment. In 1968 James N. Johnson pointed out that "wrongdoing in the arts is as real as wrongdoing in our social structure," and he writes of Brooks's In the Mecca that "no white poet of her quality is so undervalued, so unpardonably unread." In 1969, Dan Jaffe wrote that Brooks "has dealt with the question of racial as well as personal identity from the start" but also that "she has not denied the demands of the Muse for the demands of the Cause." Jaffe also observes that the label "black poetry ... veils [and even "cheapens"] her considerable achievement."
The social and political importance of the literary arguments about the value of Brooks's works--including a denial of the putative superiority of universalist claims and traditional forms--was stated with great clarity in 1975 by Haki R. Madhubuti (Don Lee), in an essay that has been widely read, having appeared as an introduction in Brooks's autobiography, Report from Part One. Before 1967 Brooks had been "on the roadway to becoming a conscious African poet" though still "accommodating her work and her person to definitions that were imposed on her from the outside"; "Gwendolyn Brooks is deeply involved with black life, black pain and black spirits" but her early work kept "within the expected" and within white norms; "Annie Allen more so than A Street in Bronzeville seems to have been written for whites." Madhubuti writes that the great poem In the Mecca represents "the redirecting of her voice to her people--first and foremost"; she is "an African poet." (This emphasis contradicts in advance the formalist and universalist assumptions and values of some critics, including Henry Taylor, whose work I will be mentioning below.)
