love song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks revisits Prufrock's hell, The

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2000 by Saunders, Judith P

2Ann Folwell Stanford's 1990 essay on "Satin-Legs" provides a detailed and perceptive analysis of the relationship betwen narrator and reader in the poem. She shows, point by point, how Brooks "confronts the problem of unsympathetic and uncomprehending readers by writing an implied reader... directly into the text" (162). The poem thus "functions as a corrective primer in reading poetry that has roots in a tradition and culture that is 'other.' Moreover, it upsets the balance of power, placing SatinLegs' tradition and life in the center, forcing the reader/critic to confront the uncomfortable possibility that his or her world is the foreign one" (168).

3R. Baxter Miller, for instance. asserts that Smith's amorous adventures constitute an escape from his problems rather than a resolution of them. Miller argues that Brooks's presentation of that escape is ironic, not celebratory, a part of Smith's failure to conceptualize his situation in larger sociopolitical terms (101-07).

WORKS CITED

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Penguin, 1954.------

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part L Detroit: Broadside, 1972.

---. "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith." Selected Poems. New York: Harper, 1944. Rpt. 1963. 12-18.

Eliot. T. S. "The Love Song ofj. Alfred Prufrock." The Waste Land and

Other Poems. London: Faber, 1940. Rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1962. 1-9. Headings, Philip R. T. S. Eliot, Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Kent, George E. "Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks." A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Eds. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 30-46.

_. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990. Melhem, D. H. "Gwendolyn Brooks: Humanism and Heroism." Heroism

in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Ed. D. H. Melhem. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990. 11-38.

_. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987.

Miller, R. Baxter. "'Does Man Love Art': The Humanistic Aesthetic of Gwendolyn Brooks." A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Eds. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 100-15.

Smith, Gary. "A Street in Bronzeville, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Mythologies of Black Women." Melus. 10.3 (1983): 261-77. Rpt. in Modern Critical Views: Contemporary Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 43-56.

Stanford, Ann Folwell. "'Like Narrow Banners for Some Gathering War': Readers, Aesthetics, and Gwendolyn Brooks's 'The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith."' College Literature. 17.2/3 (1990): 162-82.

Williams, Kenny J. "The World of Satin-Legs, Mrs. Sallie, and the Blackstone Rangers: The Restricted Chicago of Gwendolyn Brooks." A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Eds. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 47-70.