A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Sonnet-Ballad"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Sonnet-Ballad," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839693

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The Sonnet-Ballad

Gwendolyn Brooks

1949

Introduction

Gwendolyn Brooks’s The Sonnet-Ballad provides an excellent example of the formal poetry she wrote early in her career. As one would expect from the title, the poem is in traditional sonnet form of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter of which the last two lines form a couplet. Her facility with meter and rhyme (she was known to have written hundreds of sonnets) initially brought Brooks to prominence in 1945 with her first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville. With the publication of her second book, Annie Allen, Brooks became the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. Though she would move away from formal structure in her poetry toward free verse, which she felt allowed her to better express the personal and political issues of the time, she would always display in her poems the skill with the rhythm and pacing of language that she demonstrates in this