Brown will not, in the long run, be forgotten, I believe. And this recognition of him, though coming late, is a good thing. What we have in [The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown] … is about 220 pages taken from books Brown published regularly during his long career. And the most striking attribute of almost all of this poetry is its evident derivation from a profound knowledge of Blues, Jazz, and Spirituals…. Black Artists have been listening and recreating their art out of this enormously powerful legacy of music and poetry through this whole century, long before it became fashionable to look for what are called "roots," as though so much of the history of families in this country were not one of uprootedness or of being cut down again and again to the very roots.

Sterling A. Brown's distillation of Blues, Jazz and Spirituals is a lifetime's work...