SOURCE: "The 'Etched Flame' of Margaret Walker: Biblical and Literary Re-Creation in Southern History," in Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. XXVI, 1981, pp. 158-72.

Below, Miller explores Walker's use of Biblical allusions in poems from For my People and Prophets for a New Day.

The reader [of For My People] experiences initially the tension and potential of the Black South; then the folk tale of both tragic possibility and comic relief involving the curiosity, trickery, and deceit of men and women alike; finally, the significance of physical and spiritual love in reclaiming the Southern land. Walker writes careful antinomies into the visionary poem, the folk secular and the Shakespearian and Petrarchan sonnets. She opposes quest to denial, historical circumstances to imaginative will, and earthly suffering to heavenly bliss. Her poetry purges the southern ground of animosity and injustice which separate Black misery from Southern song. Her themes are time...