A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Explorer"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Explorer," 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: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836494

Book preview

10

The Explorer

Gwendolyn Brooks

1959

Introduction

The Explorer by the African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, first appeared in Harper's magazine in September 1959 and was included as the first poem in Brooks's third collection of poems, The Bean Eaters (1960). It was not included in Brooks's Selected Poems (1963) but was reprinted in her collected poems, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harper in 1971.

The Explorer is a short poem of fourteen lines divided into four irregular sections. It presents a restless, nameless man who is desperately seeking some peace and quiet in his life but is unable to find it. The poem might be understood in a universal way as an exploration of the pain of the human condition; it might also be interpreted in terms of the African American experience during the civil rights movement. The poem is valuable not only for its haunting depiction of a confused man but also as an example of the work of Brooks, one of the twentieth century's foremost African American poets, at a relatively early stage in her career, before her embrace of the militancy of the black arts movement in 1967.

Author Biography

Brooks was born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, to David and Keziah Brooks. One month after Brooks's birth, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where Brooks lived her entire life. Brooks began writing poetry as a child and always wanted to be a poet. At the age of sixteen she met two established black poets, James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, both of whom encouraged her in her writing. In 1934, the year she graduated from Englewood High School, Brooks was already contributing to a black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, which published nearly eighty of her poems. Four years later she married Henry Blakely, who also had ambitions of becoming a poet, and the couple moved to Chicago's South Side. They had