SOURCE: Taylor, Clyde. “The Human Image in Sterling Brown's Poetry.” The Black Scholar 12, no. 2 (March-April 1981): 13-20.

In the following essay, Taylor offers an appreciation of Brown's work, contending that the poet's significance “is that he planted foundations beneath modern black verse, and in so doing, provided the core of identity of imaginative Afro-American writing.”

          So if we go down           Have to go down We go like you, brother,           ‘Nachal’ men. … 

—“Strange Legacies”

The failure to recognize the central place of Sterling Brown as one of its most necessary innovators is an embarrassment to Afro-American writing. The publication of his Collected Poems¹ offers one more chance to end this severe case of cultural absent-mindedness.

Brown's achievement, which he shares with his contemporary, Langston Hughes, is that he planted foundations beneath modern black verse, and in so doing, provided the core of identity for imaginative Afro-American writing. Not knowing this...