SOURCE: Smith, Gary. “The Literary Ballads of Sterling A. Brown.” CLA Journal 32, no. 4 (June 1989): pp. 393-409.

In the following essay, Smith discusses the “complexity of Brown's artistic vision” and views the poet's major achievement as the restoration and recreation of African American folk literature.

Sterling Brown, more reflective, a closer student of folk-life, and above all a bolder and more detached observer, has gone deeper still, and has found certain basic, more sober and more persistent qualities of Negro thought and feeling; and so has reached a sort of common denominator between the old and the new Negro. Underneath the particularities of one generation are hidden universalities which only deeply penetrating genius can fathom and bring to the surface. Too many of the articulate intellects of the Negro group—including sadly enough the younger poets—themselves children of opportunity, have been unaware of these deep resources of the...