Authenticity and Elevation: Sterling Brown's Theory of the Blues

Abstract

Every poet must confront a serious problem: how reconcile one's private preoccupations with the need make poetry that is both accessible and useful others. A failure this area does not, of course, prevent the production of poems. Indeed, some poems - like many of T. S. Eliot's - may be records of this struggle, while others have the disturbingly eloquent beauty of Church testifying or 12-step program witness. One manner of reconciliation is embrace of what may be called tradition, but even this is problematic. The idea of tradition made Eliot uneasy; at best he saw it as a living artist's colloquy and competition with the dead (48-50). In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920), Eliot points out that acquiring the consciousness of the past is both necessary and perilous for a poet; and eventually, his description of it, tradition begins assume the proportions of a face that sticks that (52-53). As a poet somewhat younger than Eliot, Sterling A. Brown delighted experimentation yet also valued his role as a contributor a tradition. In the poems he composed the 1920s, Brown sought combine the musical forms of the blues, work songs, ballads, and spirituals with poetic expression such a way as preserve the originality of the former and achieve the complexity of the latter (Gabbin 42). Brown's relationship tradition was, other words, something like a mirror-image of Eliot's. Where Eliot cringed before a weighty past, Brown - focusing on the African American vernacular tradition - perceived originality and creativity be mastered and then practiced even more original manner. In fact, Brown's poetics document attitude toward tradition that is not very different than the one held by the blues singers themselves.(1) It is worth noting, also, that Brown did not necessarily see his valorization of African American tradition as inconsistent with his practice of contemporary poetic experiment. Just as Hart Crane and others fled the stultifying worldview of their parents, Brown could warn against an arising snobbishness; a delayed Victorianism among educated African Americans (Our Literary Audience 42). And when he analyzed the blues, Brown discerned a poetic approach that paralleled the Imagists and other Modernists in substituting the thing seen for the bookish dressing up and sentimentalizing that characterized nineteenth-century literary verse (The as Folk Poetry 378). In addition addressing the dilemma of privacy and access, of the proper value of tradition, Sterling Brown's work also shows how one writer negotiated the relationship of the creative arts - both highbrow and folk - the political agenda of the African American struggle for self determination as it developed the period between the two world wars. In choosing study the blues, Brown found himself engaged with a genre of poetry that offers its own clever solution these problems. The blues, Brown discovered, a bitter honesty. This is the way the blues singers and their poets have found life be. And their audiences agree (The Blues 288). Indeed, it is this agreement between poet and audience that is the reality and the purpose of the blues. Houston A. Baker, Jr., has rightly noted the unusual circumstance of the awesomely intellectual young Sterling Brown embracing a form devised by the unlettered (92-95), and perhaps important clue is found Brown's poem Ma Rainey. Rainey's art and its powerful effect on her audience, her ability to 'jes catch hold of us, somekindaway' (Poems 63) through song, is precisely the ambition of every poet, and may explain one source of Brown's attraction the blues. There are some other possibilities as well. Whether or not one sees Brown's poetry as part of the Modernist direction - or of the Regionalism that seemed make a number of largely regional splashes during the 1930s - Brown's poems also clearly embody and represent two decidedly pre-Modern projects. …