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

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by John Edgar Tidwell

Joanne Gabbin, in the first book-length bio-critical study of Brown, has good intentions but is only partially correct when she argues that "the poets who most appealed to Brown during [his apprenticeship period] were those who used freedom as their banner: freedom to choose new materials; freedom from stilted, florid poetic diction; freedom to experiment with language, form, and subject matter in new, unconventional ways; and freedom from the kind of provincialism and Puritanism that Van Wyck Brooks said in America's Coming of Age has stymied the growth of literature and art in America" (31). This argument illustrates the tendency to see African American poets in terms of the "influence" exerted on them by white precursors, or even contemporaries. In her otherwise perceptive observation, Gabbin finds it unnecessary to interrogate the practitioners of florid language in an effort to determine where Brown agreed or disagreed with their practice. Nor does she explore the remnants of his apprenticeship work, found in the "Vestiges" section of his Southern Road (1932), to determine the origins of these poems in earlier poetic practice. Moreover, Gabbin's argument neglects to probe the intraracial conversation that took place among whites, whose preeminence became the standard critics used in defining "the tradition."

As critics writing about Brown, we can find ourselves caught in the same dilemma that Brown had to face: how to demonstrate his participation in a tradition of poetry-making while simultaneously showing his uniqueness. For Brown, the dilemma had personal implications: Like his integration-minded fellow poets, he sought to prove that he belonged socially to the American mainstream while maintaining his racial integrity as an individual.(1)

I would argue that one way out of the dilemma of precursor and imitator, of provider and receiver, and of group member and individual is through the complementarity of "influence" and "intertextuality." These two approaches, as Mishkin persuasively writes, are complementary, "for they can identify each other's weaknesses . . . thereby enhancing the study of literary interaction" (8). In a fuller, more serviceable explanation, Clayton and Rothstein observe that

Strictly, influence should refer to relations built on dyads of transmission from one unity (author, work, tradition) to another. More broadly, however, influence studies often stray into portraits of intellectual background, context The shape of intertextuality in turn depends on the shape of influence. One may see intertextuality either as the enlargement of a familiar idea or as an entirely new concept to replace the outmoded notion of influence. In the former case, intertextuality might be taken as a general term, working out from the broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation (for example, by archetypes or popular culture); modes of conception (such as ideas "in the air"); styles (such as genres); and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer. In the latter case, intertextuality might be used to oust and replace the kinds of issues that influence addresses, and in particular its central concern with the author and more or less conscious authorial intentions and skills. (3)