In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men”, Brooks writes from the perspective of white troops in preparation for a war who starts to question the rationality of maintaining a segregated mindset...

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “kitchenette building” was published in 1945 and written in the South Side of Chicago presumably a few years before that, during a time when African-Americans—especially those in Northern urban centers, which were supposed...

Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry records the lives and moments of the urban, black folk of Chicago city. Brooks notes how, “if you wanted a poem, you only had to take a look out of your window” (Brooks, Report from Part One). She fervently believed in the...

In the poem “a song in the front yard,” Gwendolyn Brooks uses denotation and connotation to depict underlying meanings of specific words and phrases that add to the significance of the poem as a whole. Brooks uses denotation to refer to the...

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique created a social revolution in the 1960s by addressing the role of women in society and its effects on their emotional and mental health. Her words opened the eyes of many American housewives who felt...

Gwendolyn Brooks's poem “The Bean Eaters" highlights the loneliness and poverty of an old couple, people who have been forgotten by pretty much everyone. They have been forgotten by their kids who have grown up and moved out; they have been...

Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay Poetry is Not a Luxury makes several arguments about the purpose and power of poetry, particularly for marginalized groups like women and people of color. Her explanation of how poetry serves us—as a tool to turn radical...

In his seminal paper, Richard Dyer states that, ‘white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to...

In the poem “The Bean Eaters”, Gwendolyn Brooks illustrates the image of a simple elderly couple, whose lives have become rather mundane and routine. The first two stanzas in the poem serve as the exposition of the story, as Brooks paints a...

In the present day, poetry is often viewed as an inaccessible literary form – one that is made by and for those with a certain education and class background. T. S. Eliot commented that ‘it appears […] that poets in our civilisation […] must be ...