Brooks' poetry and place in literature

Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith, editors. A Life Distilled:
Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. 286. $27.50.

D.H. Melhelm. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice.
Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987. Pp. 270. $25.

Haki R. Madhubuti, editor. Say That The River Turns.
Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Pp. 90. $8.95

Gwendolyn Brooks. Blacks. Chicago: The David Company, 1987. Pp. 512. $15.

From her first published volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), to her most recent, To Disembark (1981), Gwendolyn Brooks has emerged as the most prolific and respected of America's black women writers. Although she is widely known throughout Illinois, not only for her publications and frequent appearances but also as Illinois poet laureate since 1969, larger critical acclaim has eluded her. In her 70th year, this critical oversight should be corrected by four new publications.

Blacks, a collection of Brooks' works chosen by herself, establishes an authoritative text for her poetry, much of it out of print. This new volume contains all of her early volumes of poetry through In the Mecca (1968), the complete text of her single novel Maud Martha (1953) and selections from her post-1969 volumes published by black presses. The anthology invites a new assessment of Brooks' contributions to the American literary canon.

To initiate this overdue effort, two recent critical accompaniments evaluate Brooks' career. Other than a Twayne introductory volume in 1980, these are the first full-length studies devoted to her.

A Life Distilled is an important collection of critical essays on the poet's work. Its goals are to reflect the entire range of her output, to explicate some of the least understood poetry and to uncover neglected areas for analysis. Its critical strategies include the sociohistorical, the New Critical, the formalistic and the feminist. Both new and established critics are represented. Houston Baker Jr.'s treatment of Brooks as a poet "caught between two worlds" is an excellent introduction, as is the late George Kent's survey of her changing approaches to her audience.

Maria Mootry's introduction demonstrates the varied influences on Brooks: the stylistic difficulties of the metaphysical and modernist traditions, the social protest of Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, the midwestern populism of Sandburg, Lindsay and Masters, the free verse of Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and the poetic incorporation of blues, ballads and black folk tales.

Gary Smith summarizes some of the paradoxes presented in the volume: for example, how Brooks' public reputation as a popular, optimistic writer is belied by her bleak poetic vision; or, how her thematic concerns for the oppressed are seemingly contradicted by her refined techniques (hence the frequent charge that she has "white style" and "black content").

An overriding question is to what extent Brooks has changed from a poet writing for whites about blacks, and thus appealing to establishment critics, to "invoking and fulfilling the need for leadership and race heroes in the black community." Many critics point to Brooks' "visionary moment" in 1967 at the Second Fisk University Writers Conference where, among younger and more radical black writers, she came into a new consciousness of her own blackness as well as her role in chronicling the growing militancy of the black community. Her break with Harper & Row in the late '60s in order to be published only by black presses, her efforts to publicize black poets by editing such works as Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology in 1971 and changes in her own style and approach.

D.H. Melhelm's biocritical study seeks to trace the development of her poetry over four decades and to furnish a critical guide for students, teachers and general readers. Providing a poem-by-poem analysis, this is not a book to be read at one sitting, but to be used to enrich one's reading of her text.

Two aspects of Melhelm's study make it particularly interesting. First, Brooks herself read the manuscript and supplied "both factual and interpretive information." Melhelm includes "interpolated remarks by the poet" in the text. This methodology might have corrected factual inaccuracies but is more questionable in supplying "interpretive information." For example, after comparing Brooks' use of concrete physical imagery with William Carlos Williams', Melhelm says that Brooks objected to such comparison. She concludes, therefore, that "citation of Williams" in her study "does not imply any influence by him on Brooks." One wonders why Melhelm accepted this conclusion and in how many other (unacknowledged) ways the poet's presence superseded the critic's own perceptions.

Another unique aspect of the work is Melhelm's use of the 20-year correspondence between Brooks and her editor at Harper & Row, Elizabeth Lawrence, demonstrating the extent to which editorial opinion shaped Brooks' writing. Perhaps the best example of their productive interaction was Lawrence's insistence that a prose manuscript of In the Mecca did not show Brooks at her strongest. The poet's subsequent decision to rewrite it as a volume of poetry resulted in one of her most powerful works.

These three timely volumes are nicely balanced by a small collection of tributes and reminiscences by Brooks' friends, relatives and fellow poets. Say That The River Turns is edited by Brooks' long-time friend — also the publisher of Third World Press — poet Haki R. Madhubuti.

Called a "Living National Treasure" by Madhubuti, Brooks is finally coming into clearer focus. Her commitment to poetry that is both finely crafted and socially responsible, her absorption of the best of various traditions — European, American, African — and her production of a body of work that transcends racial, ethnic and gender differences serve as a model of how art can create order and beauty out of deprivation and dissension. □

Babette Inglehart is professor of English, Chicago State University. She has authored Illinois Women and Their Literature " in A Reader's Guide to Illinois Literature and is currently at work on a full-length study of the lost literature of Illinois women.

February 1988 | Illinois Issues | 21