Gwendolyn Brooks

With her stunning use of form and language, Gwendolyn Brooks is often considered one of the most innovative American poets of the twentieth century. More importantly, Brooks stands out as a post-Harlem Renaissance writer who speaks honestly and passionately about the black experience. Her early works focus on life in the predominantly black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago known as Bronzeville in the 1940s and 1950s. Both A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956) depict the everyday lives of blacks, while at the same time, highlighting the uniqueness and beauty of individual experience. Though both books begin with similar inspiration, there are significant differences between the poems in each, as A Street in Bronzeville deals with more adult subject matter, and Bronzeville Boys and Girls contains poetry meant for children. The symbolism in the two books differs because Brooks weaves social commentary into the poems of A Street in Bronzeville, but attempts a more simple goal in Bronzeville Boys and Girls: to give the children of Bronzeville not only the sense that there are others sharing their experience, but to provide positive images of black life as well.

Brooks is able to understand the Bronzeville experience because of her own childhood there, and her unflinching honesty provides a sympathetic view of the neighborhood and those who inhabit it. Her own experience in Bronzeville "provided her with ineffaceable images of

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often associated with other writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived in the neighborhood, particularly those who participated in author Richard Wright's South Side Writers' Group (Bolden 98). Through her discussions with them, Brooks developed strong concerns for social issues, such as racial and class discrimination, abortion, poverty, and lynching, and began to use a poetry as a means of expressing her social beliefs (Baker 165). She even examined the concept of discrimination among blacks themselves as a social phenomenon. In "the ballad of chocolate Mabbie," Brooks describes a young girl who is so dark-skinned that "Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar" (3). She is content with her life until she develops a crush on schoolmate Willie Boone. Her feelings for Willie are unrequited as Willie seems to have a liking for light-skinned girls who "He wore like a jewel a lemon-hued lynx/With sand-waves loving her brow" (19-20). Mabbie is left alone with her "chocolate companions" (22), and she is now only "Mabbie on Mabbie with a hush in her heart" (23). Bronzeville Boys and Girls touches upon the concept of discrimination but with a happier outcome for the black characters of its poems. In "Eldora, Who is Rich," a wea

Category: Arts - G