The importance of Sterling A. Brown in Afro-American literature and culture rests on his position as an innovative poet, a folklorist, and a pioneer critic. He was among the first to identify the foundations of the black aesthetic tradition and, in so doing, saw folk culture as central to the originality and imagination in Afro-American writing. His extensive exploration of folk forms, such as the blues, worksongs, and ballads, led him to experiment in the late 1920s and 1930s with these forms in his own poetry. Aware of the vibrant qualities of folk speech, he rescued black dialect from the wastebins of minstrelsy and successfully demonstrated that it could be used to express more than the proverbial two stops of pathos and humor disparaged by James Weldon Johnson.

Brown was an innovative poet as well as a ground-breaking critic of writing by and about blacks. In a series...