SOURCE: "Margaret Walker: Folk Orature and Historical Prophecy," in Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, edited by R. Baxter Miller, University of Tennessee Press, 1986, pp. 104-16.

In the following excerpt, Barksdale examines Walker's use of folklore in the ballads of For My People and the civil rights poems of Prophets for a New Day.

Like Robert Hayden and Melvin Toison, 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 central requirement for the doctorate. But Margaret Walker's poetry is quite different from that written by Hayden or...