A Cosmopolitan Utopia on Poetic Form: A Reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad”

Abstract

“The Anniad,” a long poem in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Pulitzer prize-winning Annie Allen, is widely claimed as a high modernist poetic experiment. Annie Allen (1949), Gwendolyn Brooks’s second collection of poems, won the poet a great fame as the first African American winner of Pulitzer Award for Poetry while throwing her into an awkward controversy over her widely claimed “high-modernism.” The work, composed of three parts, is about Annie, an African American girl, growing into womanhood and growing from an egotistic romantic to a realistic idealist. My position in the analysis of the poem is based upon my disagreement with those critics who believe this poem is meant to cater to the white aesthetic taste while excluding the black readers with its high modernism or is an endeavor to subvert or deconstruct the European masters by grafting the black cultural elements and experience on the European tradition. My contention is that Gwendolyn Brooks tries to make poetry as represented by “The Alliad,” a formal and spiritual negotiation of the African American with the white modernism and the European classics. By integrating classical European poetic forms, white modernist techniques and black vernacular, Brooks develops her integrationist dream into a dream of cosmopolitanism.