19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksTo Be in Love
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Gwendolyn Brooks is a central figure in American poetry, with a career that spanned 70 years. Early on she garnered attention from well-established Harlem Renaissance poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, with whom she remained friendly until their deaths. Further, she was respected by younger Black writers like Richard Wright, bridging the gap between older writers and younger generations. Her poetry’s honest portrayals of disenfranchised urban communities, impoverishment, and misunderstood women immediately gained praise, making her both popular and renowned from the moment A Street in Bronzeville was published in 1945. The additional acclaim of Annie Allen and its Pulitzer Prize win in 1950 solidified Brooks as a major figure. The honor was also especially notable as Brooks was the first Black woman to win such an award.
Brooks’s ability to discuss desire and disillusionment, as well as their ties to injustice, make her a voice of the city of Chicago, a people, and a generation. “To Be in Love” displays both Brooks’s themes of desire and disillusionment, and her deft mastery of emotion. The poem’s speaker desires their beloved and offers unrelenting devotion. The speaker, however, is also fearful that disillusionment awaits them should they reveal the depths of their devotion to the beloved. Brooks uses descriptive language to paint a richer picture of desire and disillusionment. With a metaphor, she describes the speaker’s hands as “water” (Line 20) in the absence of the beloved, suggesting a strange, haunting freedom. Freedom, too, is a “golden hurt” (Line 24), a painful disillusionment in the absence of the beloved.
Brooks was also known as a highly supportive mentor of young people and taught in several colleges and universities. Her influence and importance have been honored in several tributes. Critics laud her flexibility in form and rhyme, as well as her ability to craft both traditional and experimental forms. Contemporary poets have written poems inspired by lines from her work, some of which are collected in The Golden Shovel anthology (2017). In an article for The Paris Review in 2021, “Searching for Gwendolyn Brooks,” poet and essayist Bernard Ferguson makes a case for Brooks’s timelessness.
Literary Context: Black Poetry
Brooks consistently identified herself as a Black poet writing about the experiences and concerns of her community, both in the city of Chicago and in the United States at large. Black poetry is a literary term that generally refers to works written by African American poets from colonial times (John Hammond, Phillis Wheatley) to the Harlem Renaissance (Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes) to the present day (Terrence Hayes, Natasha Tretheway, and Ross Gay). The subject matter of Black poetry is often tied to what is called the Black experience and may or may not include history in the United States. Black poets may discuss slavery, civil rights, and segregation in their work or their African ancestry as well as ancient forms of art, myth, and storytelling. Black poetry is generally said to be marked by influences of oral traditions that predate written forms. It may also incorporate musical forms such as spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, and rap. Black poetry can also discuss none of these things. Like “To Be in Love,” Black poetry can focus on the joys and pain of loving someone, or it can tie these universal themes to a cultural experience that explores Black love and desire against the backdrop of racism; in other words, Black poetry isn’t and shouldn’t always be defined by struggles.
Not all Black poets from the United States agree on the term African American as a description, finding limits in its focus on region. Like Brooks, they prefer to use the term Black to refer to the more extensive connection to all people of African descent, their artforms, and their varied historical locations. Brooks noted in a 1994 interview that she used the term Black to refer to those who lived in “Brazil or Haiti or France or England” as well as the United States (See: Further Reading & Resources). In her 1980 interview with Kallopie, when asked about her ties to Black cultural nationalism, Brooks noted she responded to the positive way people “were really convinced that blacks must get together, love each other, carry each other, nourish each other, and know that their fate was in their own hands. That is, if they didn’t do anything about the things that oppressed them, nothing would be done” (See: Further Reading & Resources).
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
