An Afflicted Black Mother and the Paradox of the Sonnet in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the children of the poor”
1
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This article examines Gwendolyn Brooks’ early poem, “the children of the poor,” a sonnet sequence collected in Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949), and discusses how Brooks taps into the sonnet tradition to externalize the hitherto obscured interiority of a deprived Black mother. Since the ages of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the sonnet has continually evolved over centuries and established itself as a quintessential lyric form. However, in the process, it has also been freighted with heavy cultural baggage and ideological associations. For the Harlem Renaissance poets, writing sonnets to claim their equal footing with great Anglo-European sonneteers ironically entailed a complex negotiation with their cultural and racial identity, and African American women poets were further burdened with masculine norms inherent in the sonnet tradition. In this regard, this paper will investigate how Brooks, both sympathetic and critical toward the Harlem Renaissance predecessors, employs the sonnet’s rhetorical force, lyric expressiveness, and dramatic richness to articulate the silenced voice of an African American woman represented by the protagonist, Annie, and simultaneously subverts its formal and thematic expectations. In Brooks’ reconfigured sonnets, a naïve ingénue infatuated with her own romantic imaginings transforms into a distressed yet determinedly assertive Black mother who addresses issues such as social prejudice and economic injustice with an impressive lyric authority and authenticity. This study will thus argue that Brooks’ purportedly integrationist poetic practice erodes the time-honored tradition of the English sonnet from within and demonstrates the sonnet’s potential as an alternative space for revolution and innovation.
Abstract
This article examines Gwendolyn Brooks’ early poem, “the children of the poor,” a sonnet sequence collected in Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949), and discusses how Brooks taps into the sonnet tradition to externalize the hitherto obscured interiority of a deprived Black mother. Since the ages of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the sonnet has continually evolved over centuries and established itself as a quintessential lyric form. However, in the process, it has also been freighted with heavy cultural baggage and ideological associations. For the Harlem Renaissance poets, writing sonnets to claim their equal footing with great Anglo-European sonneteers ironically entailed a complex negotiation with their cultural and racial identity, and African American women poets were further burdened with masculine norms inherent in the sonnet tradition. In this regard, this paper will investigate how Brooks, both sympathetic and critical toward the Harlem Renaissance predecessors, employs the sonnet’s rhetorical force, lyric expressiveness, and dramatic richness to articulate the silenced voice of an African American woman represented by the protagonist, Annie, and simultaneously subverts its formal and thematic expectations. In Brooks’ reconfigured sonnets, a naïve ingénue infatuated with her own romantic imaginings transforms into a distressed yet determinedly assertive Black mother who addresses issues such as social prejudice and economic injustice with an impressive lyric authority and authenticity. This study will thus argue that Brooks’ purportedly integrationist poetic practice erodes the time-honored tradition of the English sonnet from within and demonstrates the sonnet’s potential as an alternative space for revolution and innovation.
참고문헌 (21)
- Baker, Houston A, "Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance" (1987), U of Chicago P
- Brooks, Gwendolyn, "Blacks" (1987), Third World Press
- Brooks, Gwendolyn, "Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks" (2003), UP of Mississippi
- Brooks, Gwendolyn, "Poets Who Are Negroes", Phylon, 11(4), pp.312~ (1950)
- Collier, Eugenia W., "I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen", CLA Journal, 11(1), pp.73~87 (1967)[DOI]
- Dove, Rita, "Mother Love" (1995), W. W. Norton & Company
- Edford, Rachel, "Forms of Identity in Gwendolyn Brooks’ World War II Poems", College Literature, 41(4), pp.71~93 (2014)[DOI]
- Emanuel, James, "Renaissance Sonneteers: Their Contributions to the Seventies", Black World, 24(11), pp.32~45 (1975)[DOI]
- Ford, Karen Jackson, "The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry", pp.369~404 (2012), Oxford UP
- Gayle, Jr., Addison, "Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic", Negro Digest, 18(9), pp.32~39 (1969)[DOI]
- Huggins, Nathan Irvin, "Harlem Renaissance" (2007), Oxford UP
- Kent, George E., "A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks" (1990), UP of Kentucky
- Lee, Don L, "The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks", The Black Scholar, 3(10), pp.32~41 (1972)[DOI]
- Lianggong Luo, "A Cosmopolitan Utopia on Poetic Form: A Reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad”", 영어영문학, 61(3), pp.519~529 (2015), 한국영어영문학회[DOI]
- McKay, Claude, "Complete Poems" (2004), U of Illinois P
- Melhem, D. H., "Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice" (1987), UP of Kentucky
- Moten, Fred, "‘Words Don’t Go There’: An Interview with Fred Moten", Callaloo, 27(4), pp.953~966 (2004)[DOI]
- Reed, Ishmael, "The Black Aesthetic", pp.405~406 (1971), Doubleday
- Taylor, Henry, "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Essential Sanity", The Kenyon Review, 13(4), pp.115~131 (1991)
- Wheeler, Lesley, "The Poetics of Enclosure: American Woman Poets from Dickinson to Dove" (2002), U of Tennessee P
- Wright, Richard, "Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present", pp.97~106 (1994), Duke UP