SOURCE: "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Essential Sanity," in Kenyon Review, XIII, No. 4, Fall, 1991, pp. 115-31.

In the following essay, Taylor offers an overview of Brooks's poetry, artistic development, and critical interpretation.

Gwendolyn Brooks's emergence as an important poet has been less schematic, but not less impressive, than commentary upon it has suggested. It is difficult to isolate the poems themselves from the variety of reactions to them; these have been governed as much by prevailing or individual attitudes toward issues of race, class, and gender, as by serious attempts at dispassionate examination and evaluation. Furthermore, Brooks's activities in behalf of younger writers have demonstrated her generosity and largeness of spirit, and wide recognition of these qualities has led some critics away from the controlled but genuine anger in many of the poems. Brooks has contributed to this process; in interviews, and in her autobiographical Report from Part One (1972), she...