Poet Gwendolyn Brooks - Research Paper Example

(Bigsby 23) At the age of seventeen, she started to publish poem regularly. As a first black woman, she served the position of “poetry consultant to the Library of Congress” and “poet laureate of the State of Illinois” (Gates 2). Among the Brookss works, lots of are written regarding to the “civil rights activism” of contemporary society. George E. Kent, the provider of Dictionary of Literary Biography, says that she holds an exceptional place in American literature (30). In Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Richard K.

Barksdale mentioned that the poems in A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen that won Pulitzer Prize, are loyal to miniature and abrupt representation “of the black urban poor” (Kufrin 67). Maud Martha, the detail about black woman’s existence in a short form and the first and only novel by Brooks, published in the 1950. Another remark about Maud Martha by David Littlejohn, in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, reflects that it is an outstanding human research (Littlejohn 78).

In the “New York Times Book Review”, Toni Cade Bambara stated that when she was fifty years old “something happened to Brooks” and readers can get the evidence of that in “In the Mecca” and later works (Poetry Foundation). While Brooks’ poems “The Mother”, “The Crazy”, “Sadie and Maud”, and “To be In Love” comparatively work out the theme of a woman’s awkward, restricted and subservient situation in the society, in contrast, the poem “the Independent Man” upholds a man’s freedom (Evans 38).

But all these five poems together highlight the inferiority of woman and the awkwardness and the inertia that a woman feels in the male dominated society. Though Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry shows a strong commitment to her racial identity her poetic bent plays out a tone of universality through common daily