Gwendolyn Brooks is an important voice in African American poetry, as the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first Black woman to serve as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (what is now the Poet Laureate position). According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:

Brooks offered a new fusion in African American poetry. Influenced by writers such as Hughes and by the high modernist tradition then epitomized perhaps by Robert Lowell, she moved as a poet between relative simplicity and [...] a complexity of prosody [or patterns of rhythm], learned allusion, and sustained irony (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2012. p. 23).

Renowned poet Langston Hughes was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, which focused on celebrating Black life and arts, such as dance, poetry, visual arts, fashion, and more. Hughes’s celebration of local Black communities and blues music can be seen in Brooks’s work.

Modernism is a concept that encompasses many philosophies and fields of art. Poetic modernism utilizes strong imagery and rejects formal constraints. The modernist tradition in which Brooks wrote included many allusions, or references, to other poems.