Sterling Brown
Sterling Brown was a notable African American poet and scholar, renowned for his contributions to the literary landscape in the early 20th century. Born into a middle-class family in Washington, D.C., he was influenced by his parents' rich cultural background and education, particularly the stories of rural life in Tennessee. Brown's seminal work, *Southern Road*, published in 1932, showcased his innovative use of dialect to celebrate the experiences of rural southern African Americans, contrasting the prevailing narratives of the urban "New Negro."
Throughout his career, Brown taught at several prestigious institutions, including Howard University, where he profoundly impacted African American literary studies. His research and writings, such as *Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes*, were pivotal in documenting and analyzing African American literature and culture. Brown's poetic style was heavily informed by African American oral traditions, incorporating elements from blues, spirituals, and folk songs to create a unique voice that resonated with authenticity and depth. He believed in the importance of understanding and uplifting the African American experience, striving to portray the complexities of life rather than merely idealizing it. Brown's legacy is marked by his dedication to celebrating and preserving African American heritage through poetry that reflects both individual and collective narratives.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Sterling Brown
American poet
- Born: May 1, 1901
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
- Died: January 13, 1989
- Place of death: Takoma Park, Maryland
Identity: African American
Biography
At a time when critics were celebrating the urban, educated “New Negro,” Sterling Allen Brown had the courage to publish Southern Road, a collection of poetry written in dialect that glorifies the rural southern African American. Perhaps it was Brown’s own genteel upbringing that gave him the psychological distance to explore his parents’ experiences growing up in Tennessee, from which he created a unified body of work and structure of meaning in African American poetry.
Adelaide Allen Brown and the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown, pastor of Lincoln Temple Congregational Church, were middle-class, well-educated African Americans. Sterling Brown was the last of their six children and their only son. The Reverend Brown had taught in the School of Religion at Howard University since 1892, and he often spoke of friendships with such black intellectual leaders as Frederick Douglass, Blanche K. Bruce, and Booker T. Washington. He also told his children stories of his childhood in Tennessee, which nurtured in his son an appreciation for rural African American culture. Adelaide Allen Brown, a graduate of Fisk University, encouraged her son’s admiration for African American literature and his aspirations as a writer.
After he received his bachelor’s degree in 1922 from William College and his master’s degree in 1923 from Harvard University, Brown taught at Virginia Seminary and College, Lincoln University in Missouri, and Fisk University. In 1929 he began teaching at Howard University, where he remained until retiring in 1969.
Following the publication of his 1931 study of African American poetry, Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes, and the 1932 volume of his own poems, Southern Road, Brown continued scholarly work on African American fiction and drama with two volumes in 1937: The Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama. Beginning in 1936 Brown also edited the Federal Writers’ Project studies by and about African Americans. Brown supervised the interviewing that led to the publication of seventeen volumes of more than two thousand slave narratives. He insisted on including African American materials in state guidebooks, and he supervised Roscoe Lewis’s The Negro in Virginia (1940), a model of documentary research and narrative drama.
Brown composed in dialect, inspired by the spirit of the blues, which he once defined as “strength . . . stoicism . . . fortitude . . . humor . . . directness . . . frankness.” His subjects were always distinctively African American, usually rural and southern, and ordinary. He called his poetry “portraitures,” but his snapshots of southern people were equally powerful landscape painting, for a sense of place was essential to his work.
Brown developed his poetry from African American oral literature, much of which he collected in The Negro Caravan, a 1,082-page literary history of African Americans. Brown’s introductory essay to that collection of folk literature, spirituals, work songs, sermons, and blues is still considered indispensable. From such raw material emerged Brown’s own synthetic style, elements of which are drawn from blues, ballads, spirituals, work songs, black music, and mythology. Brown had great belief in the raw material and in the aesthetic integrity of his sources. He occasionally included blues lines in his work, and many of his poems derive their rhythm from African American oral forms. The folk-rhyme form, to which children often skip rope, can be heard in the lines “Women as purty/ As Kingdom Come/ Ain’t got no woman/ Cause I’m black and dumb.” The poem “Southern Road” uses the structure of a work song:
Doubleshackled-hunh-
Brown also relied on the Anglo-American tradition. He was inspired in his use of the ballad by Walt Whitman and Edward Arlington Robinson, in his use of dialect by Robert Burns, and in tone by A. E. Housman and Robert Frost. The literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes that Brown’s subject matter and everyday speech are fundamentally related to New Poetry and to the work of Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and the Imagists.
Brown drew from virtually the entire canon of English and American poetry, and he was fluent in a variety of poetic forms. With those traditions as his foundation, Brown used his African American materials to build a body of work celebrating the African American aesthetic and elevating those who gave it voice. Brown once said,
I didn’t want to attack a stereotype by idealizing. I wanted to deepen it. I wanted to understand my people. I wanted to understand what it meant to be a Negro, what the qualities of life were. With their imagination, they combine two great loves: the love of words and the love of life. Poetry results.
Bibliography
Davis, Arthur P. “Sterling Brown.” In From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982. A comprehensive study by the dean of African American critics, who knew Brown personally and taught with him at Howard University on African American writers during the 1950’s. The essays on individual writers are supplemented by ample introductory material, and there is also an extensive bibliography, listed by author.
Ekate, Genevieve. “Sterling Brown: A Living Legend.” New Directions: The Howard University Magazine 1 (Winter, 1974): 5-11. A tribute to the life and works of Sterling Brown in a magazine published by the university where he taught for forty years. This article analyzes Brown’s literary influence on younger poets and assesses his importance in the African American literary canon.
Sanders, Mark A. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Criticism and interpretation of Brown and his poetry in the context of twentieth century African American literature and intellectual life.
Thelwell, Ekwueme Michael. “The Professor and the Activists: A Memoir of Sterling Brown.” The Massachusetts Review 40, no. 4 (Winter, 1999/2000): 617-638. A fond memoir of Brown written by one of his students at Howard University. Offers a glimpse into Brown’s personality, political bent, and place as a black intellectual during the tumultuous 1960’s.
Wagner, Jean. “Sterling Brown.” In Black Poets of the United States, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. A comprehensive and insightful study of the poetry of Brown, covering the subjects, themes, and nuances of his poetry. Wagner’s writing on Brown is warm and appreciative.