Forms of Identity in Gwendolyn Brooks’s World War II Poems

Gwendolyn Brooks contends that the 1967 Fisk University Writers’ Conference transformed her ideas about poetic form and led her to set aside her poems in traditional forms and adopt free verse as a form better suited to African American expression. Much criticism of Brooks’s pre-1967 poetry confirms her assessment and associates traditional verse with constraining, even racist, frameworks. However, these forms enable rather than restrict expression, and this is especially true of her World War II poems. A nuanced reading of conventional and free-verse poems and her prose writings about the war demonstrates the singular efficacy of conventional poetic form in representing the difficult subject of war. Brooks’s traditionally formal war poems, such as “Gay Chaps at the Bar” and “The Anniad,” manage the war’s disorder, shaping the incoherent and incomprehensible war experiences of their speakers into stable forms.