[Baraka's] poems and plays have explored the subjective effects of the dominant whites' violation of black mentality, and at the same time have acted out psychologically and in fantasy the politics of intransigeant confrontation. No American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action. That is not necessarily a good thing. When the reciprocity comes out of the very nature of the language and feeling that engage the poet, when it amounts to a discovery as of the awakening of the senses, then we have to do with an accomplishment whose moral and aesthetic character are inseparable values: as in Hamlet or Coriolanus or, less grandly, in Shelley's glorious chorus in Hellas: "The world's great age begins anew." In such work the quality of the poet's engagement with truth makes him incapable of using language dishonestly. But in part of "BLACK...