Online English Test

The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks has been praised for deepening the significance of personal and social experiences so that these experiences become universal in their implication. She has also been praised for her "sense of form, which is basic and remarkable" many of her 5 poems are concerned with a Black community named Bronzeville, on the south side of Chicago. Her literary skill makes Bronzeville more than just a place on a map. This community, like all important literary places (Robinson's Tilbury Town and Masters' Spoon River, for example), becomes a testing ground of personality, a place where the raw material 10 of experience is shaped by imagination and where the joys and trials of being human are both sung and judged. The qualities for which Brooks's poetry is not are (as one critic has point out) "boldness, invention, a daring to experiment, and a naturalness that does not scorn literature but absorbs it".
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Her love for poetry began early. At the age of seven she "began to put rhymes together", and when she was thirteen, on of her poems was published in a children' s magazine. During her teens she contributed more than seventy-five poems to a Chicago newspaper. In 1941 she 20 began to attend a class in writing poetry at the South Side Community Art Center, and several years later, her poems began to appear in Poetry and other magazines. Her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945. Four years later, Annie Allen, her second collection of poems, appeared. In 1950 Annie Allen was 25 awarded a Pulitzer prize for poetry. A novel Maud Martha, about a young black girl growing up in Chicago, published in 1953, was praised for its warmth and insights. In 1963 her Selected Poems appeared.