SOURCE: "Foreword," in For My People, Yale University Press, 1942, pp. 5-7.

In this excerpt from the Foreword to For My People, Benét introduces Walker as a promising new poet whose sincerity and talent make her work successful.

Straightforwardness, directness, reality are good things to find in a young poet. It is rarer to find them combined with a controlled intensity of emotion and a language that, at times, even when it is most modern, has something of the surge of biblical poetry. And it is obvious that Miss Walker uses that language because it comes naturally to her and is part of her inheritance. A contemporary writer, living in a contemporary world, when she speaks of and for her people older voices are mixed with hers—the voices of Methodist forebears and preachers who preached the Word, the anonymous voices of many who lived and were forgotten...