Use of Prosody in the Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes

Despite her criticism, Brooks deals with race relations objectively and implicitly recreates the black experience for her readers. Brooks shed the light on the African American story through writing. While she does not take a radical approach, such as young Amiri Baraka, in making demands, or use explicit terms such as “white supremacist”, Brooks, on her own platform, shows intellectuals and color-blind conservatives the horrors of being Black in America. Her main stream style of writing was able to reach people that marches, race riots, and church leaders could not (although, later she wrote

The works of Gwendolyn Brooks has gone through several changes throughout her career. When she first published in 1945, she was eager to be understood by strangers. In her last two poetical collections, however, she has dumped that attitude and gone ?black?. Her change then led her from a major publishing house to smaller black ones. While some critics found an angrier tone in her work, elements of protest had always been present in her writing. Her poetry moves from traditional forms including sonnets, ballads, variations of the Chaucerian and Spenserian stanzas, and the rhythm of the blues to the most unrestricted free verse. To sum up, the popular forms of English poetry appear in her work, but there is some testing as she puts together lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms. In her narrative poetry, the stories are simple but usually go beyond the restrictions of place. In her dramatic poetry, the characters are often memorable because they are everyday survivors not heroes. Her characters are drawn from the underclass of the nation's black slums. Like many urban writers, Brooks has recorded the impact of city life. However, aside from most committed naturalists, she does not entirely blame the city for what happens to people. The city is simply an existing force with which people must deal with. The most dominant theme in Brooks?s work is the

Gwendolyn Brooks was an african american poet known for her easy but complex, thought provoking and deep connecting poems. She was briefly a writer and teacher. Her father was a janitor with dreams to be a doctor and her mother was a pianist who loved music. She grew up in chicago in the 20’s, a time of crime and discrimination of african americans. At a young age she developed a love for writing poems. She based her poems off of her everyday struggles with racism and sexism. She prestitted through all of the hatred she dealt with and and continued write poems that went into to details of the lives of struggling teens, independent men and women, and how to overcome hardships. People recognized and enjoyed her poems because unique style that include vivid and explicit diction, and imaginative symbols that represent life's ups and downs.

“She had plans to publish more poetry, including thirteen letters and thirty-three poems. In 1830, her poetry was rediscovered by the new England Abolitionists.” (Baym 763) From the rediscovering of her work some over the earlier information about her was corrected and many people where more understanding of her and her work. People saw her as an important literary figure because she was the first educated African American person to have published

Imagine the strength required to defy social inequality and rise to become a purveyor of culture upon a new generation of poets. Gwendolyn Brooks was one with such strength. She had the strength to overcome the garrison of social injustice which held back so many other African-Americans. She had the strength to establish herself as a master poet by being the first of her kind to win a Pulitzer Prize and be appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. She, Gwendolyn Brooks, a champion of African-American literature since her youth and a civil rights activist in her old age, wrote many critically acclaimed works of both prose and poetry and excessively garnered prestige among the ranks of twentieth-century

The granddaughter of a runaway slave, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was the first of two children born to Keziah Corine and David Anderson Brooks on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Lover of metrical writing, at the age of thirty-three published a book of poetry titled Annie Allen, subsequently becoming the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for her second book titled, Annie Allen, which included 11 poems that entail Annie’s perceptions of discrimination against African Americans as she grows up. Gwendolyn Brooks was sitting in her dimly lit living room, which she had kept this way because she was struggling with money, when she found out she had won her Pulitzer. The next day multiple photographers and reports showed up at her house to question her about her recent achievement. She knew that when they went to plug in their equipment, nothing would work due to her lack of electricity. However, when they plugged everything in, all of it worked perfectly. Someone had been secretly paying her bills. This is a great example of life imitating Brooks’ art; she wrote mostly of people with everyday problems that were able to overcome them with the help of others.

The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks used her life experiences to show her aspects of Black Movement, Social Protest, and her Identity. ¨Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve, and I began playing with words (Gwendolyn Brooks).” The quote symbolizes the ingenuity and her quality of being so young. Miss brooks being so young, and her developing the need to and the pleasure she obtains from writing about life. Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas 1917, she is the mother of two children: Daughter, Nora Blakely, and Son, Henry Lowington Blakely lll.

Gwendolyn brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. Her family moved to Chicago during the great migration when Brooks was six weeks old. Her first poem was published when she was 13 and at the age of 17, she already had a series of poems published in the poetry column “Lights and shadows” in the Chicago defender newspaper. . After working for The NAACP, she began to write poems that focus on urban poor blacks. Those poems were later published as a collection in 1945. The collection was titled A Street in Bronzeville. A street in bronzeville received critical acclaim but it was her next work, Annie Allen, that was got her the Pulitzer Prize. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000 at age of 83.

Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most highly regarded, highly influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry. She was a much-honored poet, even in her lifetime, with the distinction of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the first black woman to hold that position—and poet laureate of the State of Illinois. Many of Brooks’s works display a political consciousness, especially those from the 1960s and later, with several of her poems reflecting the civil rights activism of that period. Her body of work gave her, according to critic George E. Kent, “a unique position in American letters. In Sadie and Maud, two sisters set out on different directions

What is more important, a person 's race or their character? Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poems about African Americans and their everyday struggles. Brooks’s poems “We Real Cool”, “The Mother”, and “Gay Chaps at the Bar” help to demonstrate the racial discrimination that African Americans face in their everyday lives. Gwendolyn Brooks has said that her poetry was written for blacks and about blacks, yet any person or race can relate to the universal themes portrayed in her pieces.

In her early life she wrote about things that no-one ever wrote about such as her being sexually abused, racism, single-parenting, and her being in part of the civil rights movement. She experienced first hand racism. When she was seven years old, she got raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She was a civil right activist.

Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the many great writers. In her early poetry, Brooks attacked racial discrimination, praised African American heroes, and satirized booth blacks and whites. She showed great mastery of classic and Modernist poetic techniques.

There are plenty works of poetry that have been published, but none that match the intellect and beautiful writing aura like those of Phillis Wheatley’s. Phillis Wheatley was America’s first black female poet who learned to read and write at an age where blacks were either unable to learn or restricted from these opportunities. Most of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry consists of religion, death and the hardships and burdens blacks endured throughout slavery. With the will to overcome slavery, she went on to express her thoughts, views, and ideas through poetry. Her writing talents and deep intellect towards her works separate her from other writers and place her in a category of her

This essay examines the effects that poetry has on society, both socially and politically. Poetry has been around for centuries, and it is a common misconception that it serves no purpose. One critic in particular, W.H Auden claimed, “poetry makes nothing happen”. However poetry awakens the reader’s eyes and gives an insight to the society in which we live in today, and which has been before us. As evident in Ezra Pound’s work, as he explored the use of imagism to critique modernism and twentieth century, forcing the readers to think more about society as a whole. The purpose of this essay is to show that poetry does make something happen and can have instrumental effects on society, whether it is a poet critiquing society, or simply providing another interpretation. Poetry is a code than needs to be cracked, it is a riddle that makes the reader bring out their true creativity, which is why I disagree with W.H Auden in saying, “poetry makes nothing happen.”