Prior to 1967, Miss Brooks' poetry was widely heralded for its lyricism and technical virtuosity. But, when a critic of the stature of J. Saunders Redding favorably compared Annie Allen to a work by Cellini …, he was actually saying many things: First, that she had successfully become a luxury, to be savored by an élite whose training and money afforded them the leisure to peruse her; and second, that she had, with equal success, imposed one of the finest sensibilities of the twentieth century upon a group of values and ideas which, more often than not, were predicated upon white superiority and Black inferiority.

In the case of Miss Brooks' work, it is not simply the internalization of the idea that white is beautiful and Black ugly…. Rather, it is the imposition of an essentially Christian system of values upon the actions of her characters. What has always been...