Keywords

Gwendolyn Brooks; World War II poetry; poetic form; modernism; racism

Abstract

Gwendolyn Brooks contends in her autobiography Report from Part One that the 1967 Fisk University Writer’s conference transformed her ideas about poetic form and led her to dismiss her pre-1967 poems in traditional forms and adopt free verse as an authentic African American form. Much criticism of Brooks’s pre-1967 poetry confirms her formal assessment and associates traditional forms with constraining racist frameworks. However, these perspectives overlook the creative function of conventional forms in her poems, specifically her World War II poems. Brooks’s generically diverse WWII writings demand a more nuanced understanding of her poetry of the 1940s and 1950s than the post-67 dismissals allow. Comparing the conventional and free-verse poems to her autobiographical and prose writings about the war demonstrates the value Brooks found poetic form. The prose works indirectly respond to the conflict, whereas the poems confront it directly. War threatens to control and obliterate the identities of her poetic speakers. But the traditionally formal poems are able to manage the war’s destructive and disordering forces; they shape the incoherent and incomprehensible war experiences of their speakers in culturally esteemed verse forms. In “Gay Chaps,” “The Anniad,” and “the sonnet-ballad,” Brooks draws on the conventions of the sonnet’s love as war metaphor and the blazon, the mock-epic’s elevated language and invocations, and the ballad’s refrains and tragic theme to represent paradoxes in American society during and after WWII. Brooks’s most effective WWII poems are those traditional forms. In contrast, her free-verse poems, such as “Memorial to Ed Bland” and the first “Appendix to The Anniad” poem, fail to protect individuality of their speaker’s against the war’s inhuman assault.

Date Created

April 2011

https://works.bepress.com/rachel-edford/11/download/

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