Two writers sharing: Sterling A. Brown, Robert Frost, and "In Dives' Dive."

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by John Edgar Tidwell

It is late at night and still I am losing, But still I am steady and unaccusing.

As long as the Declaration guards My right to be equal in number of cards,

It is nothing to me who runs the Dive. Let's have a look at another five. (Robert Frost, "In Dives' Dive")

In the recent proliferation of conference papers, critical articles, and books discussing the pioneering innovation and enduring significance of Sterling A. Brown's poetry, literary critics and historians have enthusiastically shown a propensity toward tracing the resonance of "influence" in his work. The persistence of this practice can hardly be faulted because, starting in the early 1960s, Brown began explicating himself to younger generations whom he felt were unacquainted with his seminal efforts to define the distinctiveness of African American literature and culture. In numerous formal and informal interviews, poetry readings, and public lectures, Brown professed an indebtedness to precursing and contemporary writers, including English poets (Ernest Dowson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman), African American poets (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and nameless vernacular artists), and the New American Poets (E. A. Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Robert Frost).

In between professing and practice, though, lies a fundamental problem, if we elect to follow Brown's "stage directions" for understanding his poetic apprenticeship. We are challenged by the paradox engendered in his revelation: How can we effectively describe the uniqueness of his poetry and, at the same time, locate it within a tradition of poetry making? Brown, as James Weldon Johnson discovered, always followed his supposed confessions about literary debt with denials about the extent to which anyone shaped and molded his work. Faced with the prospect that readers would interpret Johnson's use of "ultimate source," in his introduction to Southern Road (1932), to mean inartistic, slavish imitation, Brown stubbornly resisted Johnson's analysis with this rejoinder: "I think . . . you overstress the influence of the so-called folk epics. These have hardly been my sources. Folk experience has been" (Letter to Johnson). As a consequence of Brown's retreat, seekers after literary indebtedness find themselves entrapped in poetic miasmas, where the illusory substitutes for the real. I will argue that a relational strategy called "sharing" enables a more appropriate description of the category of influence informing Brown's uniqueness and his participation in a tradition of poetry-making.

My argument involves three basic concerns. I shall describe the concept of "influence" to reveal how its flexibility as a critical term enables a broader discussion of Brown's claim to poetic uniqueness than is generally found in previous studies of his work. Using arguably the most pointed example of Brown's acknowledged "indebtedness," that of Robert Frost and his poem "In Dives' Dive," I take up the question of how a feature of "influence" I call "sharing" provides both points of convergence and divergence between Frost's and Brown's vision of American poetic tradition. Finally, from my account of "sharing," I derive three general criteria I consider important to describing Brown's poetic distinctiveness and employ these criteria to advocate a relational strategy I believe most effectively applies to reading his work.

Recent study of "influence," as related especially to African American literature, has shown, among other things, that the way of reading literary interaction has generally centered on the imitation of white authors by African American writers. Essentially this relationship has been seen as a one-way street, with the motives of African American authors evolving out of a felt need to prove their "personal merit" and "racial merit" to whites. It's no small wonder, then, that, especially in the mid-eighteenth century, when "originality gained prominence and [when] influence [that is, homage to a venerated predecessor] grew suspect" (Mishkin 5), African American writers came to be viewed negatively as imitative and derivative. In his response cited above to James Weldon Johnson, Brown demonstrates a certain defensiveness about or sensitivity to such accusations.

In addition to showing us feelings of sensitivity, Brown's response to Johnson perfectly illustrates the usual way in which "influence" has been defined - poetic relationships having a generic or thematic connection, in which a younger writer adopts and subsequently modifies a precursing writer's subject matter, form, or style. Out of this pursuit, which theorist Tracy Mishkin develops more fully, came the critics' "interest in source-hunting" (5), which further crystalized "influence" as denoting a "father-son" relationship. Brown himself struggled against this familial metaphor in his denial to Johnson, but it is precisely the imposition of a precursor-imitator relational strategy that constrains many critics writing about Brown.