In "The Liar," an early poem written while he still called himself Jones, he commented on this aspect of his personality, almost as if he anticipated his various guises and the direction his writing would take in the future:
Though I am a man
who is loud
on the birth
of his ways. Publicly redefining
each change in my soul, as if I had predicted
them,
and profited, biblically, even tho
their chanting weight,
erased familiarity
from my face.
Baraka's life and work resist easy classification or simplistic judgments; yet, beneath the often violent shifts and turns of his artistic and political views, it is possible to view his work in distinct stages as an evolving spiritual autobiography shaped by the imperatives of an intensely self-conscious sensibility. If there is any single preoccupation which runs through Baraka's work, it is the theme of change itself, the endless quest for appropriate vehicles of expression and action in a world which is itself constantly changing. Nevertheless there are significant and sometimes subtle lines of continuity between phases of his career.
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