SOURCE: Manson, Michael Tomasek. “Sterling Brown and the ‘Vestiges’ of the Blues: The Role of Race in English Verse Structure.” MELUS 21, no. 1 (spring 1996): 21-40.

In the following essay, Manson analyzes the verse structure of Brown's “Challenge” and explores the role of race in the poem.

Although poets continue to discuss the significance of particular poetic forms or verse schemes, literary critics less frequently examine the constitutive nature of such structures.¹ We usually comment on large structures like the sonnet or small ones like metrical variations only in order to drive home a point that originated elsewhere, in some other textual, biographical, historical, or cultural inquiry. Less often do we begin with versification as a way of understanding history or ideology, even though it is frequently the starting place for poets.

This trivialization of prosody in literary criticism has as much to do with the dominance of the field...