Miss Brooks writes tense, complex, rhythmic verse that contains the metaphysical complexities of John Donne and the word magic of Appollinaire, Eliot, and Pound…. [Her style], however, is often used to explicate the condition of the black American trapped behind a veil that separates him from the white world. What one seems to have is "white" style and "black" content—two warring ideals in one dark body. (p. 43)

The real duality appears when we realize that Gwendolyn Brooks—though praised and awarded [by the world of white arts and letters]—does not appear on the syllabi of most American literature courses, and her name seldom appears in the annual scholarly bibliographies of the academic world. It would seem she is a black writer after all, not an American writer. Yet when one listens to the voice of today's black-revolutionary consciousness, one often hears that Miss Brooks's early poetry...