SOURCE: Barksdale, Richard K. “Margaret Walker: Folk Orature and Historical Prophecy.” In Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, edited by R. Baxter Miller, pp. 104-17. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Barksdale writes that Walker's poetry is characterized by a sensitivity to ordinary, urban, American life, in contrast to the writing of many contemporaries, such as Robert Hayden or Melvin Tolson, whose work appears much more influenced by academia.

Like Robert Hayden and Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker has written her poetry in the shadow of the academy. Both of her advanced degrees from the University of Iowa—the master's degree in 1940 and the Ph.D. in 1966—were granted because of her achievements in creative writing. Her first volume of poems, For My People (1942), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and helped her to gain the master's degree; her prize-winning novel, Jubilee, fulfilled the...