City and Alienation in Gwendolyn Brooks' Poetry Ankita Dhar Karmakar College

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry records the lives and moments of the urban, black folk of Chicago city. Brooks notes how, “if you wanted a poem, you only had to take a look out of your window” (Brooks, Report from Part One). She fervently believed in the street as the source of her poems, greatly admiring Hughes’ use of the same, in his poems. Her first collection of aptly titled poetry, A Street in Bronzeville provides a sauntering glimpse on city scenes of the urban black folk. These glimpses, which become photographic, exude modernist traditions of the ‘self’ and ‘surroundings’. While Brooks’ poem, ‘kitchenette building’ presents the space of dismal urban housing in the city, ‘The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith’, mocks the ostentatious self of a swanky, urban, black middle-class man. This essay will try to explore the idea of the city as the African-American metropolis of impoverished materiality, which produces alienated selves.

Brooks uncertainly meanders between modernist traditions of poetry and the black, romantic identity of the New Negro Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. As a matter of fact, Brooks travels further and presents the city’s detachment on its characters, as the poem ‘old marrieds’, will demonstrate. She thus,...