In his 1987 book, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, D.H. Melhem observes that several of the poems in "The Womanhood" section of Annie Allen, including "Beverly Hills, Chicago," employ a modernist technique coined by T.S. Eliot called "objective correlation," which Eliot describes as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion." Often, instances of objective correlation manifest as lists, repeated phrases, or selective imagery; examples in "Beverly Hills, Chicago," would be the repetition of "We drive on," and the association of the moving car with the notion of observing, from a removed perspective, the lives of the wealthy. "The dry brown coughing beneath their feet," also demonstrates a minute and uncharacteristically unpleasant detail of the "golden gardens," which sets the ironic tone; for the speaker, the dead leaves are an easy fix: rake them. But for the residents of Beverly, the leaves represent a melancholia that must be removed by the labor of the handyman.
Other examples of objective correlation can be found in Brooks' later work; for example, in her poem entitled, "The Bean Eaters," Brooks lists the items strewn about an aging couple's rented back room in Bronzeville, and that carefully selected list of items becomes a total representation of their lives in that room. (For more on "The Bean Eaters," see our full GradeSaver guide.)
