[Most of the poems in Sterling Brown's "The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown" were composed in dialect and] had as their subjects distinctively black archetypal mythic characters as well as the black common man whose roots were rural and Southern. Mr. Brown called his poems "portraitures," close and vivid studies of a carefully delineated subject that suggested a strong sense of place.

These portraitures the poet renders in a style that emerged from several forms of folk discourse, a black vernacular that includes the blues and ballads, spirituals and worksongs. Indeed, Mr. Brown's ultimate referents are black music and mythology. His language, densely symbolic, ironical and naturally indirect, draws upon the idioms, figures and tones of both the sacred and the profane vernacular traditions, mediating between these in a manner unmatched before or since.

But it is not merely the translation of the vernacular that makes his...