Gwendolyn Brooks essays

Gwendolyn Brooks essays Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black community, particularly in the communitys vision of itself. The constant in Brooks poetry has been her loyalty to characters who find themselves trapped in an environment scarred by racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. Gwendolyn Brooks, the daughter of David Anderson Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka Kansas. Brooks was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, and the first African-American woman to be inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Brooks family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth. Her parents set a high priority on literature, and she began to collect her poems in notebooks at age eleven. Gwendolyn had a difficult time in school and was rejected for her shyness as well as her skin Brooks attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, but transferred to the all-black Wendall Phillips, then to the integrated Englewood High School. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work. Brooks was influenced at first by the Harlem Renaissance. Her early work featured the sonnet and the ballad, and she experimented with adaptations of conventional meter. Later, development of the black arts movement in the sixties, along with conceptions of a black aesthetic, turned her toward free verse and an abandonment of the sonnet as inappropriate to the times. However, she retained, her interest in the ballad, its musicality and accessibility, and in what she called "verse journalism." Brooks died in December 2000. Brooks writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. She uses ordinary speech. ...