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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“The Lovers of the Poor” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)
This is another one of Brooks’s most well-known poems, and one of her longest. She employs perfect as well as slant rhyme, as well as iambic pentameter. Brooks’s third-person perspective follows the story most closely to the well-off Ladies of the Ladies’ Betterment League, examining social injustice from the perspective of unsympathetic oppressors.
“After Apple Picking” by Robert Frost (1914)
A significant departure in content from Gwendolyn Brooks, she and Robert Frost share the distinction of being influential 20th-century American poets. In “After Apple Picking,” Frost uses and breaks his rhyming rule freely:
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired (Lines 23-29).
The uneven meter and easy form give the poem a raw, intimate feeling. Moments of vulnerability in this poem are less gave than in “the mother,” though still poignant.
“Mothers” by Nikki Giovanni (1972)
This poem explores a mother-child relationship from the perspective of the child. Like Brooks, Giovanni limits her use of capital letters to keep the poem grounded.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks