Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African-American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

Read more about Gwendolyn Brooks:  Biography, Career, Excerpt, Honors and Legacy, Bibliography

Famous quotes by gwendolyn brooks:

    Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?
    Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    Had she been worth the blood, the cramped cries, the little stuttering bravado,
    The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,
    The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    ‘I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
    If not an overture, a desecration.’
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    Each body has its art, its precious prescribed
    Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes,
    Or push of pain or when a grief has stabbed,
    Or hatred hacked is its, and nothing else’s.
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    Forgotten and stinking they stick in the can.
    And the vase breath’s better and all, and all.
    And so for the end of our life to a man,
    Just over, just over and all.
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)