The Sonnet-Ballad (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Annie Allen, the volume that includes “The Sonnet-Ballad,” has received significant amounts of criticism. Some of this came from other African Americans, writers and non-writers, who strong felt Brooks was failing to confront the issues and experience of being black in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Brooks’s early work was often written in traditional forms, such as sonnets, and it was felt by certain critics that these were European constructs that failed to speak to the black experience. Don L. Lee, a black writer and activist of the time, has written of the poet’s early work in “The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks.” He argues that by using “their [Europeans’] language ... she suffers by not communicating with the masses of black people.” On the other side of the coin, certain white scholars, while admitting to Brooks’s skill with language, thought she was at times too quaint in her portraits of mothers and children, or the poor.

Regardless of these criticisms, few could argue against the inherent talent evident in even Brooks’s earliest books. American writer Stanley Kunitz claimed in Poetry magazine that “Miss Brooks is particularly at home in the sonnet, where the tightness of the form forces her to consolidate her energies and to make a disciplined organization of her feelings.” Even after Brooks largely abandoned the use of formal structures in 1968, with the publication of In The Mecca, partly due to a life-changing experience at The Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University, she would always be known for her skill with language. But most of all it was the human element of her writing that won her so much acclaim, as she continually displayed an ability to capture the emotional, social, and political reality of her time. Langston Hughes has echoed this when he once wrote of Brooks’s first two books: “There are sharp pictures of neighborhoods, relatives, friends, illnesses and deaths; of big city slums, cafes, and beauty shops.... The people and the poems in Gwendolyn Brooks ... are alive, reaching, and very much of today.”