Gwendolyn Brooks
...d eagerly check out four or five books and have them all read in a few days. Brooks explained the impression that movies had on her, leading her to believe that “the glittering white family life on the screen should be my model.” A poem entitled “Beulah at Church” tells us exactly how her church-going years influenced her life (Brooks, Report 10-16). In another poem, entitled “The Preacher: Ruminates Behind the Sermon,” she described a curiousness for how it must be like to be God (Brooks, Selected 8). Many of Brooks’ works were written in response to racial prejudices happening in the world around her. In her poem “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” Brooks responded to a Chicago teenager named Emmet Till, who was beaten and killed in Mississippi in 1955 (Brooks, Selected 75-80). Brooks was described as adopting “the point of view of the young white woman who accused the youth of making sexual advances toward her. The sympathetic portrayal of the woman is striking; the husband, however is a flat symbol of murderous white oppression … the woman’s romantic vision of southern womanhood collapses convincingly before her growing knowledge of the Dark Villain’s innocent youth” (Bloom 173). In Brooks’ first volume, A Street in Bronzeville, she conveys “dislocations and uncertainties brought about by World War II,” especially in the sonnet series “Gay Chaps at the Bar” (Mainiero 242). Brooks’ writing about black life during the Depression and war years in Bronzeville, a mostly black town in Illinois near Brooks’ hometown, is said to be written “with a candor and sympathy and art that was, in its quiet way, a watershed in American literary and cultural history.” Her poetry was known for discu...