Poet Gwendolyn Brooks Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

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 â€Å"poetry consultant to the Library of Congress† and â€Å"poet laureate of the State of Illinois† (Gates 2). Among the Brookss works, lots of are written regarding to the â€Å"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 â€Å"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 â€Å"New York Times Book Review†, Toni Cade Bambara stated that when she was fifty years old â€Å"something happened to Brooks† and readers can get the evidence of that in â€Å"In the Mecca† and later works (Poetry Foundation). While Brooks’ poems â€Å"The Mother†, â€Å"The Crazy†, â€Å"Sadie and Maud†, and â€Å"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 â€Å"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