Biography Essay

Louise Bennett has been popular since she began to write poems and read them in public in Jamaica in the late 1930s, and her fame continues to grow. Her poetry, as well as her prose monologues on radio and the Anancy tales she published, are rooted firmly in the oral-culture tradition of Jamaica. The Creole language of this tradition, its folk material, and its forms of perception delayed her recognition as a serious artist during the first part of her career. However, she was awarded an M.B.E. in 1960, and, after the cultural reorientation of the 1960s and 1970s, her commitment to the tradition was no longer perceived as a limitation but as an asset, which won her continued popular appeal, a central position in Jamaican literature, institutional recognition (the Order of Jamaica in 1974 and an honorary D.Litt. from the University of the West...