Title: The Love Song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks Revisits Prufrock's Hell
Author(s): Judith P. Saunders
Source: Papers on Language & Literature. 36.1 (Winter 2000): p3. From Literature
Resource Center.
Document Type: Article
Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" (1944) alludes unobtrusively
throughout to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which in turn refers
both explicitly and implicitly to Dante's Inferno (1321). Together, Eliot's and Brooks's poems
form a double-layered trajectory pointing back to a common fourteenth-century source,
offering two distinctly different Modern revisions of its assumptions.[1] In their recasting
of the Inferno, Eliot and Brooks locate hell on earth, in human social environments where
their fictive characters are permanent residents; it is readers, rather than protagonists, who
are taken on illuminating guided tours. Both poems provide stinging critiques of twentiethcentury civilization, with its manifest social, ethical, and spiritual problems. Just as Eliot's
depiction of Prufrock and his environment derives ironic impact from allusion to the Inferno,
Brooks's portrait of Smith depends for similar effect upon covert comparison with Eliot's.
Brooks's familiarity with Eliot's poetry is well established. She mentions first reading his
work at age sixteen, and she expresses special regard for "Prufrock" (Report 173): "I do
like, for instance, Eliot's 'Prufrock,' and The Waste Land, 'Portrait of a Lady,' and some
others of those earlier poems" (Report 156). Readers have discussed Eliot's influence
on diction, phrasing, imagery, tone, theme, and narrative posture in a number of the
poems in her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, the collection in which "Satin-Legs" first
appeared (Kent, A Life 140; Melhem, Brooks 29-30, 49; Smith 43-50). Specific parallels
between "Satin-Legs" and "Prufrock" have been recognized, moreover, although they have
not generated extensive comment. D. H. Melhem, for example, observes that Brooks's
poem approximates Eliot's in length, that it "similarly deals with an antiheroic vision," and
that its aims reinforce Eliot's while at the same time raising others: "Eliot would improve
us socially and spiritually. Brooks, no less concerned, probes social ills at their roots in
poverty and discrimination" (Brooks 34). Gary Smith notes intriguing contrasts in self-image
and personal style between Prufrock and Brooks's protagonist; he suggests that "SatinLegs" (along with two other well known poems in the Bronzeville collection) offers "parodic
challenges to T. S. Eliot's dispirited anti-hero" (46). This understanding of "Satin-Legs"
is briefly underscored by Ann Stanford (169). Brooks's allusion is sufficiently elaborate,
however, to require more detailed investigation than it has yet received if the relationship
between the two poems is to be appreciated fully.
Formally, Brooks's poem models itself on Eliot's to a considerable degree . Total length
is equivalent-Brooks's 153 lines measured against Eliot's 131. Both poems are divided
into unequal, non-schematically arranged sections, ranging from short, two-line bits to
longer chunks of twenty lines or more. Both rely heavily on rhyme, favoring couplets but
committed to casual or accidental placement rather than to any definite scheme. Brooks's
poem shows more instances of internal rhyme, and Eliot's more examples of repeated
lines and phrases. Both poems tend strongly toward an iambic rhythm, but except in her
short epilogue Brooks sticks faithfully to a pentameter line-"a well-mastered, fluid blank
verse" (Kent, A Life 70)-while Eliot swings easily from three-foot to five- and even six- or
seven-foot lines. Diction in both cases is demanding, often Latinate; these poems achieve
eloquence with rich vocabulary and sometimes elaborate syntax. They are peppered with
high cultural references and allusions. Prosodical and rhetorical choices in both poems
combine to create an unusual balance between gravity and elegance, on the one hand,
wryness and wit on the other.
The titles of the poems serve as perhaps their most obvious point of formal similarity.
Rhythmically, both consist of an iamb followed by two anapests (Eliot's including a final
unstressed syllable, or feminine ending):
-- x | -- -- x| -- -- x | -- The Love| Song of J.| Al fred Pru| frock -- x | -- -- x | -- -- x The
Sun| days of Sat| in - legs Smith
The strong echo in rhythm is matched by equally noticeable echoing in phrasing. Both
titles refer to the something of Somebody. Brooks has simply substituted a new name and,
more significantly, replaced the term "love song" with that of "Sundays." This shift works
to underline the irony in Brooks's reworking of Eliot's theme: her protagonist lacks the
spiritual hungers of his predecessor, and Sunday emphatically is not, as a reader might
first anticipate, a day of worship and prayer for him. It is rather the day when he, in stark
contrast to the lonely, rejection-haunted Prufrock, steps out on the town with a woman
and eventually takes her to bed. On Sundays Smith achieves the love that eludes Prufrock
throughout his "love song."
Both poets shape narratives around a central character, but Brooks departs from Eliot's
model by declining to let her protagonist speak for himself. Her poem is not a dramatic
monologue-and for excellent reasons. Her decision to present her character indirectly, to
speak for him rather than through him, constitutes the most decisive difference between
her formal rhetorical choices and Eliot's. Smith says nothing on his own behalf. He stands
in diametrical contrast to Prufrock, whose eloquence in articulating his misery in no way
helps him to surmount it, and whose verbal sophistication does not enable him to establish
meaningful communication with other human beings. Smith's inability to articulate the
insights Brooks's narrating voice supplies obviously calls for a different rhetorical strategy
than that operating in "Prufrock." Eliot's protagonist speaks aloud, to himself and to his
readers, relying on unarticulated but implicit similarities between his situation and theirs.
Brooks, for her part, must act as intermediary between protagonist and readers, explaining
and sometimes justifying choices or behavior she assumes readers otherwise would
neither understand nor be prepared to admire: "the poem runs a contrast between white
expectations and black reality" (Kent, "Aesthetic" 42).[2]
In terms of setting, action, and theme, we observe Brooks laying down central premises
closely aligned with Eliot's, i.e., she locates her protagonist in "hell" and focuses on his
quest for female companionship. Like Eliot, she draws on Dantean imagery to suggest the
netherworld. Eliot evokes "yellow fog" and "yellow smoke" that correspond to the "forever
dirty" and "dismal air," the "most acrid" smoke of the Inferno (Eliot 15-25; Dante III,
28; VI, 11; IX, 72). The foul atmosphere of the Inferno, described with emphasis and
frequency, functions as an objective correlative to the sinfulness of hell's occupants; evil
is realized concretely in the tainted air. Eliot's "yellow fog" and smoke similarly suggest
corruption, but also exercise an unexpected soporific effect, dulling the sharpness of the
protagonist's anguish. The famous opening comparison of the evening sky to "a patient
etherized upon a table" makes clear the anesthetizing power of the polluting haze (3). To a
man who feels like a live insect stuck squirming on a pin, anesthesia must be welcome, for
it diminishes clarity of conscious perception, hence the domestication of the cat-like yellow
fog, which becomes a comforting presence as the poem proceeds.
The effect of fog in Brooks's poem closely mimics that in Eliot's, but it exists on a wholly
figurative level. When she shows Smith emerging from his hotel room to stroll through a
desperately poor part of Chicago, we are told that "sounds about him smear, / Become
a unit" (79-80). "He hears and does not hear" the sounds of wretchedness surrounding
him, e.g., "a woman's oath," the "spiritless expectoration" of a tubercular neighbor (80,
83, 84). In the following stanza, Smith's sense of sight undergoes a parallel kind of
deadening. "Pictures, too, as usual, are blurred. / He sees and does not see" signs of misery
that greet him on every side: broken windows mended with newspaper, children dressed
in ragged clothing, "men estranged . . . from wonder and from joy" (89-90, 96-97). Here
haziness is not an attribute of the external environment, but a half-deliberately induced
blunting of the protagonist's human senses. For Smith, as for Prufrock, such dulling of
perception is crucial for warding off pain. Only when reality "smears" or "blurs" does it
become bearable. Brooks echoes Eliot even more closely when she tells readers that "the
pasts of [Smith's] ancestors lean against / Him" and "fog out his identity" (114-20). In
these lines she attempts to explain that Smith must be understood in terms of his heritage.
No matter how little he himself recognizes that his tastes and goals have been shaped
by the deprivations that constitute his legacy, Brooks demands that we see him as part
of a larger panorama of social and moral problems. Associated with generations of social
injustice and its consequences on individual "identity," "fog" continues in her poem to play a
hellish role.
We know Eliot's Prufrock is in hell or its equivalent because of the poem's epigraph. His
wretchedness and self-condemnation reinforce our natural inclination to interpret his
environment, however apparently privileged, as a hell on earth. Brooks provides no clue
so direct as Eliot's epigraph, but her portrayal of urban poverty, including harsh glimpses
of racial stratification, sufficiently suggests the hellishness of Smith's everyday world.
The "hotel" in which he lives may in fact constitute an allusion to the "one-night cheap
hotels" in the streets through which Prufrock leads us in the opening lines of Eliot's poem
(74, 6). Smith lives in the world Prufrock merely passes through, a world which Prufrock
is inclined to romanticize: "Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets / And
watched the smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out
of windows? . . . "(70-72). Even Brooks's unusual word choice in describing Smith's outcast
status-"his desertedness"-may be intended as evocation of the "half-deserted streets" along
which Prufrock moves to reach the upper-class, tea party world in which he belongs (4).
The outward conditions of Smith's life are the obverse of Prufrock's: six days of the week
for Smith are "shabby," filled with "intricate fear . . . / postponed resentments . . . prim
precautions" (10-11). If on Sundays he feels "royal," this temporary elevation of mood
stands in contrast to the ongoing powerlessness he experiences as a black man earning a
precarious living in a white-dominated socioeconomic system: the Chicago of the 1940's.
The movie scene (lines 121-25) further defines the dangers and humiliations to which racial
prejudice exposes him, e.g., "the heroine / Whose ivory and yellow it is sin / For his eye to
eat of" (122-24). In this section tone is arguably at its bitterest, as Brooks briefly sketches
out the backdrop against which Smith's triumphantly fulfilling Sunday activities occur.
Brooks builds on the steadily emerging similarities between her poem and Eliot's to
showcase a series of contrasts between Smith and Prufrock. These can be summarized
in terms of background, temperament, behavior, and self-image. Prufrock inhabits a
world of upper-class wealth and privilege; Smith lives surrounded by poverty and racial
prejudice. Prufrock describes his social world articulately, even theatrically, and he
judges its deficiencies harshly; Smith neither analyzes his situation nor generalizes from
it (Williams 59). Prufrock is motivated to challenge the larger problems he discerns and
condemns, although he lacks the courage to follow through; Smith contemplates no
rebellion, concentrating his energies instead on forging purely personal satisfactions.
Prufrock expresses feelings of unease and inadequacy, despite membership in an elite social
group; notwithstanding his lack of social status, Smith demonstrates assertiveness and selfesteem. Socially, Prufrock fears the negative judgments of others, particularly of women;
Smith expects and receives positive reactions from others in his social universe, especially
from women.
These large contrasts are buttressed by many particulars, as Brooks carefully juxtaposes
her protagonist to Eliot's. Clothing, for instance, gleans a relatively minor mention in Eliot's
poem but functions as a central motif in Brooks's. Prufrock bemoans his appearance in
order to convey his lack of self-trust, his obsession with the critical judgments of his social
companions: those eyes that will "fix [him] in a formulated phrase" until he is "pinned
and wriggling on the wall" (55-58). Sure that he is dressed impeccably ("my necktie rich
and modest, but asserted by a simple pin"), Prufrock nevertheless believes the impression
he makes is "almost ridiculous" (43, 118). He dwells on signs of his aging not only to
emphasize the passing of time and his own inaction, but to suggest his unattractiveness
to the opposite sex. Hence Brooks is able to employ Smith's obsession with fancy clothing
and outward appearance to highlight vital differences between the two characters. Smith's
self-esteem ("he looks into his mirror, loves himself") and his successful pursuit of women,
traits that distinguish him definitively from Prufrock, are intimately connected with his
outrageous wardrobe (64). The "wonder-suits in yellow, and in wine," the "ballooning
pants" and "hysterical ties" are the source of his nickname and of his reputation as a lady's
man: "Inamoratas, with an approbation, / Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination" (48,
52, 54, 1-2). His "vault" of a closet contains his most precious possessions, fuels his Sunday
well-being and sense of self-worth: "He is fat / And fine this morning" (45, 4-5).
In showing the reader "the innards" of Smith's extravagantly stocked clothing closet, Brooks
alludes to the opening line of Eliot's poem with ironic effect (51). "Let us go then, you and
I," Prufrock urges, inviting readers to enter the world of his loneliness and self-deprecating
impotence (1). "Let us go," "let us go," he reiterates twice more in this first section of the
poem (4, 12). Using nearly identical wording-"Let us proceed"-Brooks's narrating voice
invites readers to join in examining Smith's wardrobe, source of the very real satisfactions
he achieves despite circumscribed opportunities (43). Persistent regal imagery in the
opening sections of the poem further highlights this difference between the two characters.
Smith feels "royal" on Sundays: "he designs his reign," lives out the full significance of
his "title" (4, 6, 2). For his part, Prufrock explicitly rejects any such notion: "I am not Prince
Hamlet, nor was meant to be" (110). Closer by far, in terms of actual wealth and status, to
royalty than Smith (whose "heritage of cabbage and pigtails" is explicitly noted), Prufrock
nonetheless despairs of realizing qualities of eminence, authority, or initiative (27).
Eliot's cat imagery also makes a brief appearance in this section of Brooks's poem,
reinforcing the contrasts in self-image between the two characters. Where Prufrock looks
to the anesthetizing, comfortingly domesticated "yellow smoke . . . / Rubbing its back
upon the window panes" to alleviate his anxieties (24-25), Smith finds solace in his own
appearance and schemes: awakening, he "unwinds, elaborately: a cat / Tawny, reluctant,
royal" (3-4). More like a lion than like Prufrock's tame housecat, he embarks upon his day
with full confidence in his own physical and mental fitness to prevail in his environment.
Thus Brooks transforms Eliot's metaphor: instead of signaling surrender to a deadening
environment, the cat becomes an image of personal power and pride.
The quest for women's company, which provides impetus for the forward movement in
both poems, clearly forms a major point of contrast between the two protagonists. Prufrock
fears rejection to such an extent that he cannot approach a woman at all. In fact, he
scarcely looks at women as whole beings, seeing instead merely body parts, garments, and
accessories: "arms," bracelets, "a shawl," "a dress" (62, 66, 64). He names no particular
woman as the object of his desire or the audience for his love song, and he regards all
females as the embodiment of humiliating criticism. If he tries to tell a woman "all,"
including revelation of his metaphysical questions and insights, she might simply dismiss
him: "That is not what I meant at all" (95-97). And his yearning to confide in a sympathetic
female is undercut by a fundamental ambivalence: the women he observes who "come
and go / Talking of Michelangelo" look like willing participants in the scheme of social
hypocrisy and self-disguise he despises (13-14, 35-36). He wishes, apparently, for an allwise, quasi-divine woman, perhaps someone like the Beatrice figure in Dante's trilogy, a
woman who would provide a combination of spiritual guidance, moral example, and human
love. Frustrated by the absence of any such goddess-like rescuer, he finds otherworldly
females only in the mythic mermaids who appear at the poem's conclusion. And these
fabulous females, too, he is certain, will turn away from him and refuse to exercise their
siren-like powers on him. He is so worthless, in his own view, that even creatures who
derive amusement from enticing men to their doom will not waste their time enticing and
destroying him: "I do not think that they will sing to me" (125). Insofar as the sirens' song
is a representation of male desire (male urges displaced and attributed instead to the fatally
seductive females), Prufrock ends his love song expressing fears that desire itself-along with
actual women-will elude him.
Smith's quest for female companionship could not be more different. Untroubled by selfdoubts and consistently successful, he is portrayed as having squired and bedded numerous
women. If readers are perturbed by his lack of monogamous focus, he is not: there is no
hint that he wishes his relations with the opposite sex to be anything other than what they
are.[3] The poem opens, moreover, with the statement that he is popular with women.
They appreciate his clothes; they enjoy his company; they have "bestowed" upon him the
nickname of "Satin-legs." Brooks concludes her poem with six italicized lines depicting
Smith's lovemaking with the selected "lady" of the week. This day on which he is king,
managing to transcend the deprivations and degradations that otherwise shape his life,
ends with the most fundamental of human pleasures:
Her body is like new brown bread Under the Woolworth mignonette. Her body is a honey
bowl Whose waiting honey is deep and hot. Her body is like summer earth, Receptive, soft,
and absolute. . . . (148-53)
Food imagery ("bread," "honey") indicates how much he is nourished and sustained by
this connection; D. H. Melhem notes the "delicacy" of the "lyric epilogue," which lends
the conclusion of Brooks's poem "a startlingly romantic note" (34). His experience of the
female body is said, furthermore, to be "absolute." The poem concludes with this word,
which lends extra significance to the human event and human feelings it characterizes. The
encounter itself may be transitory, but while it lasts the experience is perfect in its human
completeness: nothing is missing. Thus Smith, for all the poverty and external difficulties
in his life, achieves with a woman the satisfactions unrealized by his wealthy counterpart in
Eliot's poem. Smith's quest ends in the simple consummation of desire; Prufrock's ends only
with fears about his relations with women, doubts concerning his own erotic potential .
Brooks's poem effectively strips eros of the metaphysical weight it carries in Eliot's and
Dante's poems. Both Brooks's predecessors associate woman's love with redemption.
Protagonists unable to extricate themselves from a moral and spiritual "dark wood," or its
equivalent, require external, female guidance (Headings 21). Dante's protagonist, of course,
receives such guidance, while Eliot's does not. Prufrock's desires are more complicated than
Smith's in that Prufrock seeks to share profound, vaguely metaphysical communication
with a woman, and possibly also to articulate to her his denunciation of his social universe
(Headings 24). Certainly his wish to "force the moment to its crisis" has implications that go
beyond the physical (80). This difference between his desires and Smith's appears in large
measure to be a by-product of economic and educational differences between them and in
no way blunts the fact that Brooks's protagonist obtains fulfillment on his own terms, where
Eliot's fails to do so. Smith does not need to look to women for spiritual solace or insight.
The good he seeks with them is free of transcendent meanings because, unlike Dante or
Prufrock, he is not perceived-by himself or by his poet-creator-as enmeshed in any guilty
collaboration. He is free of the morbid introspection that is Prufrock's most salient trait for
the best of reasons: the injustice and aridity of the environment in which he finds himself
are emphatically none of his making.
Why, after all, are these characters in "hell" in the first place? To what ends do the poets
offer readers these guided tours through regions of the damned? In each case, the implied
relationship between narrator and reader provides an important clue in understanding
the poet's purposes. As already noted, Eliot's Prufrock assumes readers know, or at least
understand, his world of porcelain and marmelade and cultural one-up-manship. If readers
do not end in judging Prufrock quite as severely as he judges himself, it is because they
recognize something of themselves in him. Readers, too, have experienced the power of
social structures and strictures to thwart the quest for human and spiritual fulfillment. They
too have been "afraid" (86). And, like Prufrock, readers perhaps can recognize their own
collusion with these same stifling social forces. The epigraph to Eliot's poem forces readers
to consider whether they themselves may be living in an earthly hell: will they learn, Dantelike, from observing Prufrock's futile torments, or are they doomed to participate in endless
cycles of personal and metaphysical sterility?
As already noted, Brooks's poem addresses an audience much more distant from the
protagonist. Frequently the poet-narrator interrupts the narration of Smith's day to
caution readers against evaluating him by inappropriate standards. As Stanford points out,
Brooks's narrator assumes a set of "unsympathetic and uncomprehending readers" (162).
These "implied" readers play a crucial role in the poem, bearing the brunt of Brooks's satiric
energy: "In the dynamic between the narrator of the poem and the reader/critic, Brooks
critiques and revises an aesthetics predicated on the assumption of white Euro-American
superiority" (162, 163). Without guidance, Brooks clearly implies, an audience unfamiliar
with Smith's world will condemn his tastes-in music, in perfume, in women and, above all,
in clothes. Over and over she tells readers that poverty and lack of education explain many
differences between Smith's aesthetic values and theirs. Yet underlying these differences,
she insists, there are essential commonalities; once perceived, these commonalities may
persuade readers that Smith's approach to living is not really so very different from their
own after all. Brooks speaks, for instance, of the need in life for alluring scents ("life must
be aromatic"), for self-adornment, for food, for beauty, for sex (15). All humans need
these things, but the forms in which they seek them vary. Smith's tastes could resemble
those of the implied readers only if he shared those readers' socio-economic and cultural
background. His urge to clothe himself in fabrics, colors, and patterns that their "limited
understanding" deems garish to the point of offensiveness "represents the indomitability of
the human spirit in its quest for beauty," expressing itself in an alien, but not illegitimate,
set of aesthetic standards (Stanford 163; Kent, A Life 69). As Brooks herself has articulated
the point elsewhere, "human beings will break away from ache to dance, to sing, to create,
no matter how briefly, how intermittently. . . . [L]ike an under-earth river, that impulse to
beauty and art runs fundamentally, relentlessly" (qtd. in Melhem, "Humanism" 33).
His background renders Smith incapable of appreciating understated effects: he wants
his women to wear "three layers of lipstick, intense hat / Dripping with the most voluble
of veils" (134-35). He enjoys "affable extemes . . . . [L]ike sweet bombs" because
only intensity and extremity will speak to a man with "no education / In quiet arts of
compromise" (136, 138-39). By upper-middle class standards Smith's preferences are
flamboyant, but with passing references to "baroque" and "Rococo" Brooks reminds us
that the aesthetic tastes of Western high culture have gone through periods when the
elaborately ornate was valued (73). One obvious effect of her portrait is to bridge some of
the distance between Smith and the reader, to generate a degree of fellowship between
them (Miller 104). In the end Smith removes the garments that have come to represent
critical differences separating his world from the reader's, and he goes to bed naked, these
external distinctions peeled away.
The only way to universalize upper-middle class taste, Brooks flatly informs us, would
be through universal redistribution of upper-middle class wealth. There is "little hope"
of reforming the tastes of a Smith unless we are willing "to set the world a-boil / And do
a lot of equalizing things, / Remove a little ermine, say, from kings, / Shake hands with
paupers and appoint them men" (36-40). The poem constitutes an unmistakable indictment
of the economic and social system responsible for Smith's circumstances. The moral
and political questions directed toward the reader are more pointed and more disturbing
than those in Eliot's poem precisely because of the greater distance between reader and
protagonist. Where Eliot would have us ask ourselves whether we are acquiescing in our
own damnation, Brooks forces us to ask whether we have acquiesced in the damning of
others. Working to break down barriers of class and race between reader and protagonist,
the poem compels acknowledgment of sweeping social evil. Brooks achieves her purposes
all the more powerfully by emphasizing her protagonist's strengths and achievements
more than his grievances. He is not foremost a victim, as she presents him, but a man who
against all odds has contrived for himself a bearable, sometimes even joyful, existence in
circumstances-arguably hellish-to which he has been consigned without justice or reason.
Smith's successes emerge with all the more clarity against the backdrop of the comparison
with Prufrock operating quietly throughout Brooks's poem. The sustained allusion to Eliot's
dramatic monologue, built on parallels in setting and plot, and reinforced by echoes in
phrasing, imagery, and prosody, is a key element in Brooks's carefully crafted campaign to
shape reader response to her unusual protagonist. Indeed, to win esteem for a character
like Satin-Legs Smith is far from simple, and the contrast with Prufrock provides just the
vehicle Brooks needs to accomplish that difficult task. In terms of characterization, she
effectively turns Eliot's poem inside out, portraying a man of low status and low income
who nevertheless manages his life more competently than does his wealthy, high-status
counterpart in Eliot's poem. Diametric differences between the two protagonists push
readers toward admiration for Brooks's, fueling a corresponding impatience with Eliot's.
The more we shake our heads at Prufrock, who has failed miserably to enjoy his many
advantages, the more we celebrate Smith, who has realized so much satisfaction even
in a context of poverty and prejudice. The effect of allusion in Brooks's poem, finally, is
to compel appreciation of Smith's unsubdued vitality. Refusing to succumb to despair or
self-pity, even in an environment that would excuse such surrender, Smith triumphantly
reverses nearly every one of Prufrock's failures.
WORKS CITED
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Penguin, 1954.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part I. Detroit: Broadside, 1972.
--. "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith." Selected Poems. New York: Harper, 1944. Rpt.
1963. 12-18.
Eliot. T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The Waste Land and Other Poems.
London: Faber, 1940. Rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1962. 1-9.
Headings, Philip R. T. S. Eliot, Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Kent, George E. "Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks." A Life Distilled:
Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Eds. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: U
of Illinois P, 1987. 30-46.
--. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990.
Melhem, D. H. "Gwendolyn Brooks: Humanism and Heroism." Heroism in the New Black
Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Ed. D. H. Melhem. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990.
11-38.
--. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987.
Miller, R. Baxter. "'Does Man Love Art': The Humanistic Aesthetic of Gwendolyn Brooks."
A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Eds. Maria K. Mootry and Gary
Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 100-15.
Smith, Gary. "A Street in Bronzeville, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Mythologies of Black
Women." Melus. 10.3 (1983): 261-77. Rpt. in Modern Critical Views: Contemporary Poets.
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 43-56.
Stanford, Ann Folwell. "'Like Narrow Banners for Some Gathering War': Readers, Aesthetics,
and Gwendolyn Brooks's 'The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.'" College Literature. 17.2/3
(1990): 162-82.
Williams, Kenny J. "The World of Satin-Legs, Mrs. Sallie, and the Blackstone Rangers: The
Restricted Chicago of Gwendolyn Brooks." A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry
and Fiction. Eds. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 47-70.
[1] Philip R. Headings provides a useful overview and discussion of Dantean allusions
in "Prufrock." See "Dantean Observations" in T. S. Eliot, Revised Edition (19-31).
[2] Ann Folwell Stanford's 1990 essay on "Satin-Legs" provides a detailed and perceptive
analysis of the relationship between narrator and reader in the poem. She shows, point by
point, how Brooks "confronts the problem of unsympathetic and uncomprehending readers
by writing an implied reader . . . directly into the text" (162). The poem thus "functions as
a corrective primer in reading poetry that has roots in a tradition and culture that is 'other.'
Moreover, it upsets the balance of power, placing Satin-Legs' tradition and life in the center,
forcing the reader/critic to confront the uncomfortable possibility that his or her world is the
foreign one" (168).
[3] R. Baxter Miller, for instance, asserts that Smith's amorous adventures constitute
an escape from his problems rather than a resolution of them. Miller argues that
Brooks's presentation of that escape is ironic, not celebratory, a part of Smith's failure to
conceptualize his situation in larger sociopolitical terms (101-07).
Source Citation
Saunders, Judith P. "The Love Song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks Revisits
Prufrock's Hell." Papers on Language & Literature 36.1 (2000): 3. Literature Resource
Center. Web. 16 Oct. 2010.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A62026146