SOURCE: D'Costa, Jean. “Poetry Review.” Jamaica Journal 2, no. 3 (September 1968): 24-8.

In the following essay, the author compares Brathwaite to Virgil and focuses on themes of exile.

It is significant that before Brathwaite the poet comes Brathwaite the historian. Only a historian could create so intimately and fully the world of Rights of Passage and Masks. This world is one we know well: that of the negro in the western hemisphere. But while others like Cesaire and Baldwin have treated this world fragment by fragment, Edward Brathwaite attempts a synthesis of a splintered, shattered area of experience, and manages to bind together in a single poetic vision both Louisiana and Brixton, the Golden Stool of the Asante and the slums of Harlem. In Rights of Passage we are shown the panorama in time and space of the exile and wanderings of the negro. In Masks, which completes our understanding...