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Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Work

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

This volume gathers representative works from across Gwendolyn Brooks's celebrated career, spanning from her early formal verse to her later free-form explorations of urban Black life. The collection reflects her evolution as a poet who chronicled the experiences of ordinary people in Chicago's South Side with precision and empathy. Brooks's work is recognized for its technical mastery, its unflinching social observation, and its expansion of American poetry's subject matter and voice. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks serves as an introduction to her substantial contribution to twentieth-century American literature, presenting poems that address themes of racial identity, community, struggle, and resilience without relying on biographical speculation or critical interpretation beyond what is established in public record. more

Author

Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was a prominent American poet whose work delved into the African American experience. Born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, she spent much of her life in Chicago, Illinois. Brooks' poetry frequently depicted the struggles and victories of the African American community, and she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her collection 'Annie Allen'. She passed away on December 3, 2000. more

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“As a mode of perception that often becomes a style of life, paranoia weaves around the vulnerable self or group an air-tight metaphysic and world view. Paranoia is an antireligious mysticism based on the feeling or perception that the world in general, and others in particular, are against me or us. Reality is perceived as hostile. By contrast, the religious mystic experiences the ground of being as basically friendly to the deepest needs of the self. That which is unknown, strange, or beyond our comprehension is with and for rather than against us.”

“The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!”

“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!”