Gwendolyn Brooks and Housing as a Civil Right

Abstract This chapter argues that Gwendolyn Brooks’s many house poems look for more in the home than the lasting security that FDR, at the time of A Street in Bronzeville, claimed led to “true individual freedom.” At stake in questions of housing is the creative imagination that privileges aesthetic activity in times of necessity, in addition to the political resistance and radicalized consciousness that are more obvious accompaniments. The chapter goes on to show that Brooks’s use of character is usefully re-examined through the house poem, which gives the reader an opportunity to set the figure of a person against the ground of a condition. Brooks’s poetry examines how the individual fits into the mesh of economics and politics that determines, at least in part, what role they play vis-à-vis others.