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Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 and died in 2000, so she formed a bridge between contemporary arts and Harlem Renaissance. She got to know some of the founders of Negro Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, and she also taught younger African-American poets, for instance, Sonia Sanchez and Rita Dove. In this respect, her poetry embraced and synthesized the literary tradition of the Plantation period, the Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement; so the reader can find not only the traces of Negro spirituals and folktales but also the patterns of jazz and rap music in her poems. Gwendolyn Brooks was a ?Poet Laureate? and acquired high critical acclaim in the US among African-American poets, however, in this book, I do not just praise Brooks?s poetry as such, instead of this, I try to identify certain salient topics and characteristics of Brooks?s poems typical of African-American people and the black vernacular. In an attempt to accomplish this goal, I introduce four topics through which I believe the suggested distinctiveness grows to be presentable. The themes are the following: religiosity, musicality, sexuality and social entrapment.

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Gergely Kitta, MA: English literature; MA: Communication Studies. Pazmany Peter Catholic University, Piliscsaba, Hungary. Senior Researcher. Szazadveg Foundation, Budapest.

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