While Gwendolyn Brooks has more than established her place in the world of poetry, she did not do so without receiving criticism. During her early years, other African-American writers argued not against the presence of her talent, but that she did not use her poetic gifts to speak directly to the experience of blacks in America. The key to this seems to be the word “directly”; one could argue that she did indeed write of her experiences of oppression and hardship, but did so indirectly. Much of her early work not only was written in traditional forms, but was also written about mythological figures in the European language of the time. “Strong Men, Riding Horses” provides an excellent example of how Brooks might have gone about writing of personal, timely issues by using a mythological veil. It is a poem predominantly about the mythic figure of the Westerner: the strong, male, frontiersman who headed west to explore or confront whatever challenge presented itself. She uses this to set up the contrast of the weakness and fear the speaker of the poem feels, as the second and third stanzas state, with a first person “I,” the feelings of inadequacy. The turn is made with this short, two-line stanza that follows the first. If one were to read just these two lines, and even the final stanza that follows, they would be hard pressed to locate this in the myth of the West. They might instead think it to be the words of someone trapped and unhappy in a contemporary urban area or a poor rural town. It is this combination of mythological subject matter and subtle contemporary reference—of which this poem is an excellent example—that brought Brooks into the poetry world. And even though she would alter her style years later and become much more directly political, these poems have a certain solidity and power, in addition to their control of language, that should be studied as well.

Author Biography

Combining a commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, Brooks has bridged the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young militant writers of the 1960s. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, but raised in Chicago, Brooks started writing poetry as a child. She was inspired by her parents, Keziah Wims Brooks, a school-teacher, and David Anderson Brooks, a janitor who had failed to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor because of insufficient funds for tuition. By the late 1930s Brooks had published some seventy-five poems and had been encouraged in her efforts by Langston Hughes. Following graduation from Wilson Junior College in 1936, she worked briefly as a maid and then as a secretary to Dr. E. N. French, a “spiritual advisor” who sold potions and charms out of a Chicago tenement building known as the Mecca. In 1938 Brooks joined the NAACP Youth Council, where she met Henry Lowington Blakely II. The two were married the following year and in 1940 saw the birth of their son, Henry Lowington Blakely III.

In 1941 Brooks attended poetry workshops at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, producing poems which would appear in her first published volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). This work was a poetic description of the everyday lives of the black people who occupied a large section of Chicago called “Bronzeville.” Its themes would feature prominently in Brooks’s works during the next two decades: family life, war, the quest for contentment and honor, and the hardships caused by racism and poverty. Annie Allen (1949), her next book of poems, continued the movement of Brooks’s poetry toward social issues. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first time that the award had been presented to a black honoree. Brooks’s daughter Nora was born the next year and in 1953 the author published Maud Martha, a novel.

Over the next several years, Brooks produced a book of poetry for children and worked on a novel

which she later abandoned (although the first chapter was published as both a story and a poem). Her next major collection, The Bean Eaters (1960), details the attempts of ghetto inhabitants to escape feelings of hopelessness. The importance of the volume derives from Brooks’s continued mastery of poetic forms and her movement away from autobiographical tensions and toward social concerns. Brooks’s popularity and national visibility increased in the 1960s—in 1962 President John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival. New pieces in Selected Poems (1963) reveal the author’s growing interest in the civil rights movement; among the new poems was a salute to the Freedom Riders of 1961.

Brooks experienced a change in political consciousness and artistic direction after observing the combative spirit of several young black authors at the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in 1967. This inspiration helped inform the volume In the Mecca (1968), in which Brooks abandoned traditional poetic forms in favor of free verse and increased her use of vernacular to make her works more accessible. In Riot (1969) and Family Pictures (1970) Brooks evoked the revolutionary legacy of such slain black activists as Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and examined the social upheavals of the late 1960s. And in the nonfiction book A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975) Brooks advised beginning poets.

The 1980s continued to bring Brooks honors and awards—in 1980, she read her works at the White House with Robert Hayden, Stanley Kunitz, and eighteen other distinguished poets. Now holding over forty honorary doctorates and having served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1985 to 1986, Brooks continues to read her works throughout the United States.

Poem Text

Lester after the Western

Strong Men, riding horses. In the West
On a range five hundred miles. A Thousand.
      Reaching
From dawn to sunset. Rested blue to orange.
From hope to crying. Except that Strong Men are                 5
Desert-eyed. Except that Strong Men are
Pasted to stars already. Have their cars
Beneath them. Rentless, too. Too broad of chest
To shrink when the Rough Man hails. Too flailing                 
To redirect the Challenger, when the challenge                 10
Nicks; slams; buttonholes. Too saddled.

I am not like that. I pay rent, am addled
By illegible landlords, run, if robbers call.

What mannerisms I present, employ,
Are camouflage, and what my mouths remark                      15
To word-wall off that broadness of the dark
Is pitiful.
I am not brave at all.

Poem Summary

Line 1

This is an interesting subtitle in which we can see Brooks combining the modern with the traditional, as the rest of the poem will do. “After the Western” evokes the Old West but suggests that the subject of the poem comes later, “after” the West of American legend is gone. The phrase also evokes the “Western” as a movie genre, and suggests that Lester “takes after,” or resembles, images from film. Immediately, therefore, Brooks is suggesting the source of the patterns after which men model their “strength.”

Lines 2-3

Echoing the actual title, the most substantial stanza of the poem begins. It continues to emphasize the western mythology in use and leads us into huge open spaces. The open range, miles and miles, and in such space, a “reaching.” Notice how Brooks chose to place the word “reaching” at the end of the line, as if it is doing what it says, into the white space of the page.

Lines 3-4

The description of the West continues as two more measurements of the journey are offered. In addition to the geographical miles in line 3, there is now a measurement of time, and then a more imagistic version of color, as “rested blue to orange” can be seen as another way to describe the move from dawn to sunset.

Line 5

Here there is one final way of measuring the journey, though it is quite different. The similarity is established with the parallel structure, which implies that the subjects are related or meant to be compared. The parallel structure here is the use of the sentence with the “From … to …” rhetoric. This last version of it though, “From hope to crying,” is more abstract. In fact, one could argue that the three different descriptions move from the fairly concrete world of specific events (“From dawn to sunset”) to the abstract world of colors (“blue to orange”), to the even more abstract world of emotions (“From hope to crying”). This line also begins a series of reasons why these western men, these strong men, are able to survive such a journey.

Line 6

The first thing that makes the men exceptional in the face of the hardship they encounter is that they are “desert-eyed.” This could mean several things. It could mean the eyes are open and expansive. Given the lack of water and life in a desert it could offer the connotation of a lack of emotion, or humanness. Most likely though it refers back to the journey “from hope to crying” to say that the strong man’s eyes are dry, without tears.

Line 7

Here the admirable exceptions continue as the strong man is “pasted to the stars.” The most logical meaning here might be that the man is already drawn to and connected to another world, the world of stars, and not to an earthly one that takes us through a cycle of hope and grief. There are of course other possibilities; for instance it might mean the man is seen a particular way by others,

Media Adaptations

An audio cassette titled Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton was released in 1993 by the American Academy of Poets Tape Program.
A recording of “Gwendolyn Brooks Reading Her Poetry” is available from Caedmon press.

admired and raised above other people, as the speaker of the poem is doing. There is also then an unexpected detail in this line, that of the car. Thus far the poem has stayed within a traditional western landscape, an old western scene. Suddenly there is an automobile. This is Brooks’s subtle way of approaching the contemporary world through the mythic.

Lines 8-9

This line continues the description of characteristics that seem, with another unexpected element, to make the Strong Man admirable to the speaker of the poem. He is “rentless.” This again could be said to evoke a more modern scene as it is far more common to rent a place to live, or a car, in the mid-twentieth century in which Brooks writes than in the traditional, or even contemporary West. Regardless, it reaffirms the idea that the man is free from obligation to others.

The poem then turns to a different rhetorical structure to continue the description of such a man. The use of “too” at the beginning of several phrases serve to show how he is adequately prepared for what he confronts. In this case, and leading into line 9, he is “too broad of chest,” too big and strong to falter when the “Rough Man”—another mythic figure it seems—challenges him.

Lines 10-11

Here the description continues from line 9 as the man is now “too flailing” to “redirect the challenger.” This seems to imply that the strong man is so involved, so caught up in the action of defending himself that he doesn’t even think to evade his challenger. He confronts him head-on. This could be seen as less of a strength, as it implies that he to a certain extent has lost his head, his ability to make wise choices. In fact one could argue that many of the qualities attributed to the Strong Man aren’t necessarily positive or admirable qualities. But it seems here that the speaker of the poem intends them to be. In this case the man takes on his challenges directly, and struggles with what will become an issue toward the end of the poem, bravery.

There are then, in line 11, different ways with which the challenge confronts the man. They range from subtle (“nicks”) to forceful (“slams”), to odd (“buttonholes”). This last one refers to a way of detaining someone, often with conversation, as if you are barely holding them there, perhaps by the edge of their shirt or garment. This adds an interesting, intellectual element to the challenges that might face the man—they might include verbal skills and discourse. This might also be seen as a reference to the poem itself, a challenge of words that Brooks is trying to confront. “Too saddled” is a final, interesting descriptive reference which could be intended to offer the image of the man firm and stable upon the saddle of his horse. It could also mean too burdened to worry about anything or anyone else, as to saddle a horse is to burden it.

Lines 12-13

This short stanza is the major turn in the poem. Up until this point, except for the reference to the car, the poem has taken place exclusively in the landscape of the rural West. It has also been written in third-person narrative referring to the Strong Man. Suddenly here, with a stanza break the poem shifts to a first person “I” and, one could argue, a more urban landscape. The speaker is admitting that he or she is not like the Strong Man described previously, and talks of having to pay rent to “illegible landlords” and having to avoid robbers. This person is held down by having to pay rent and cannot confront danger when it presents itself. Notice too in all of this that the word “illegible” to describe the landlord provides more evidence that this poem has some connection to the written word. As “buttonholes” introduced the idea of conversation in the context of the Strong Man defending himself, the landlord is criticized for not being clear, or readable. This might be a reference to the landlord’s dishonesty. Regardless of this, it seems more and more likely that Brooks intends use of language, or writing in particular, to be another place in which this struggle continues.

Lines 14-17

In this final stanza the speaker of the poem continues with the confession of shortcomings. He or she admits that whatever effort might be made to defend, it is only in the name of disguise, of hiding one’s self from the threat. Offered too are two more references to the role of words or speech in all of this, as line 15 mentions the mouth and line 16 uses the inventive and hybrid verb, “word-wall.” The speaker does not just wall off the coming threat, but uses words to do so. This additional mention of the role of words in the speaker’s defense seems enough to conclude that the writing of the poem has been metaphorically represented by the tale of the Westerner.

This brings up the compelling idea that Brooks might be talking of her own attempts to write poetry. It is well known that she was criticized by some for not writing more directly of the experience of blacks in America. And though in the poem she refers to the enemy as “that broadness of the dark” and no doubt means that powerful and mysterious experience of the unknown and of night, she might also be alluding to the darkness within, the personal sufferings kept hidden. It could even be interpreted to be the darkness of her skin, or the mass of blacks who have suffered great oppression in America. The challenge of representing them, and speaking for them might well be what Brooks realizes she has been avoiding. This is a touchy issue, given that the narrative speaker of any poem doesn’t necessarily have any connection to the writer of the poem. And the poem could certainly exist just as a description of having to confront great odds, “dark” of any sort. But it seems too that one could read this poem as representative of the difficult position Brooks was in as an individual artist on the one hand, and a member of an oppressed race of people on the other.

Line 18

This final line is stark and powerful after such long lines. It re-invokes the landscape of the West and the Strong Man by talking of bravery, the quality he was being praised for earlier in the poem, but does so without shifting the focus from the speaker of the poem, the first person “I.” This is a good example of when it is important to keep in mind that the writer of a poem and the speaker in the poem are often separate. Here, the speaker is admitting his or her lack of bravery in the face of a world that is threatening, economically and physically. Gwendolyn Brooks, however, as the author of the poem, displays great bravery in confronting such a subject, such an idea, and writing about it with strength and grace.

Themes

Strength and Weakness

“Strong Men, Riding Horses” begins right after the final credits roll, the Western movie and its images of strength still fresh on Lester’s mind as he heads back out into the bright, downtown street. Brooks does not specify which movie, or what characters, but it does not matter because Lester has named them for himself as he plays scene after scene back in his mind: Strong Man, Rough Man, Challenger. The names are capitalized as if proper, and to Lester, each character becomes more real for what they represent than for who they are.

We do not learn what kind of person Lester is until later in the poem, but in the first stanza we gain insight into his psyche by what he remembers most from the movie. He remembers their broad chests that stretched larger than life across the screen, implying tremendous physical strength in the face of danger. He remembers their eyes, the camera zoomed in close enough to see the whole sunset reflected there, “blue to orange,” though they are too emotionally strong for any tears to well up: “From hope to crying. Except that Strong Men are / Desert-eyed.” And beyond this physical and emotional strength there is a sense of determination, to make it alone with the land; no matter what, they are staying outdoors, in the open, part of them permanently “pasted to the stars.”

Courage and Cowardice

After comparing himself to the characters in the Western, Lester admits “I am not like that.” While cowboys live in the land of endless horizons and burning sunsets, dodging danger left and right, Lester realizes he lives in the city of rent and “illegible landlords,” a downtown where muggers lurk in the shadows of alleys. He is no cowboy. His actions, he admits, are “camouflage,” a poor disguise for someone he is not. He does not have the courage or vocabulary to build a wall with his words against the “broadness of the dark” which surrounds him. Instead, he concludes, compared to the cowboys, he is “pitiful” and “not brave at all.”

American Dream

Underlying this poem is the theme of the American Dream. Strangely, in the middle of a

Topics for Further Study

Think of a movie you have seen recently that featured a character you admired for her/his physical or emotional strength. Write a poem describing this character in the face of a conflict, but end the poem by admitting how you would have reacted in the same situation. Remember to use specific images to paint the scenes with sensory details. Compare poems and discuss.
What do you think the speaker means when he says “What mannerisms I present, employ, / Are camouflage …” in the final stanza? How would you paraphrase that line?
Brooks describes a speaker who cannot live up to the ideal hero in the western movie he just saw. Do you think there is more pressure today on youth from the media to be somebody you are not? Discuss your answers.

scene describing the wide landscape, endless sunsets, and cowboys dodging bullets, an automobile appears in the line “they have their cars beneath them.” We can guess that the cowboys really have their horses beneath them, but for Lester the message is the same; they are free, they go where they please, they are independent. What still lingered from the Old West in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a sense of “rugged individualism,” or the belief that anyone could succeed with enough determination and raw strength. This was an essential personal characteristic on the western frontier, where everyone stood equal against forces—wild animals, natural disasters, murderous invaders—that could literally kill you if you were not strong enough.

Although the idea of rugged individualism is the foundation of the American Dream, the dream did not hold up against changing times. It was soon clear for many people that anyone had an equal chance to have a house in the suburbs, a nice job, 2.3 kids and a car to drive them to Sunday school—that is, unless you were Hispanic, Black, a woman, a Jew, or homosexual.

When the house lights in the theater are still down, the American Dream can survive in the hopes of cowboys and strong men. But for Lester, a black man with rent and muggers on his mind, that dream fades as soon as the credits roll, the curtain closes, and he steps back out onto the bright street.

Style

Though “Strong Men, Riding Horses” isn’t written in a traditional form, it does, like most of Brooks’s work, have internal structure and deliberateness. The poem is written primarily in free-verse, though many of the lines are exactly, or one syllable more or less than, ten syllables long. One gets the feel that this poem, the first stanza especially, could very well have been a sonnet. But it does break up and establish its own form as it proceeds, using amidst the free-verse some internal rhyme to hold it together. One could argue that Brooks, by having the form close to that of a sonnet but then breaking from it and opening it up, creates the effect of letting the language and the form mimic the mythological subject of the poem, which has to do with the idea of breaking free from the east, going west into the open range.

Historical Context

In 1960, the year “Strong Men, Riding Horses” appeared in The Bean Eaters, the Civil Rights Act was still four years to fruition. It was legal in some states for employers to discriminate against applicants based on their race. Southern Senators fought vehemently from February 29 to March 5 in an attempt to block a civil rights act that would allow federal referees to monitor polling locations where discrimination had been reported. With a national mood still resistant to civil change in some areas and outright hostile in others, many urban blacks found themselves struggling just to get by in the ghetto, trapped by economic and racial barriers. These are the people who inhabit Brooks’s collection The Bean Eaters, in which she begins many poems with a brief epigraph introducing the characters in her poems. Everyone we meet—whether it is Roger of Rhodes, Leslie Eileen, Lester just walking out of a movie theater after seeing a Western, or the famous seven hanging out in front of the pool hall in “We Real Cool”—share a common

Compare & Contrast

1960: America’s relationship with Cuba quickly deteriorates after Fidel Castro signs an agreement at Havana on February 13th with Soviet first deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan. The paper strongly ties the neighboring island to Communist Russia both politically and militarily. Tensions caused by both American and Russian threats of nuclear action over the tiny country later come to a head in a naval standoff to be known as The Cuban Missile Crisis.
1998: Although Cuba is one of only a very small handful of Communist countries remaining, the relationship between Castro, still in power, and the American government, improves. Castro shows a sign of goodwill by allowing the visit of Pope John Paul II, and American business investors pressure Washington to ease sanctions on Cuba so they may invest in the fertile market there.
1960: Hughes Laboratory in Malibu, California introduces the first commercial lasers. They will be used for industrial metalwork cutting and welding.
1998: Lasers are widely used in a variety of diverse applications, from corrective eye and dental surgery to military targeting and “smart bombs.” Scientists and science-fiction writers alike perceive lasers as being the eventual first line of defense against any stray asteroids heading toward Earth.

goal: to escape their hopelessness and get out of the ghetto.

Movies are a form of escape, and for a young urban kid there must have been nothing more inviting than the wide expanse of a western sunset across the theater screen. By 1960 the Western as movie genre had settled into some common thematic and cinematographic devices you can expect to see in any movie released today. These devices include: panoramic landscape shots so wide the characters are mere dots against the horizon; the loner who is strong and unfaltering against any challenge; the ambiguous “Indians” who attack without warning; and, of course, the cowboy in his white hat riding off into the sunset. This romantic portrayal of the frontier days was attractive to a nation which believed that anyone with enough courage and common sense could make something of himself.

Movies during this time did not offer African Americans many positive role models. Most black actors and actresses still played stereotypical roles of chauffeur or housemaid in the Hollywood lives of the rich. There is little surprise in the conclusions Lester makes for himself, holding his life up against the template of the strong white men riding around in the absolute freedom and limitless opportunity of the open frontier. “I am not like that,” he sadly concludes. “I am not brave at all.”

Critical Overview

“Strong Men, Riding Horses” provides an excellent example of Gwendolyn Brooks’s early work, for which she both won a Pulitzer Prize (1949 for her second volume of poems, Annie Allen) and received fair amounts of criticism. Criticism, when it came from the mainstream, predominantly white critics, while acknowledging Brooks’s skill, cautioned her against what some saw as a quaint portrait of American life—motherhood, family, the poor. But a large amount of criticism came from other black writers and activist who felt that Brooks was avoiding a direct confrontation and examination of the black experience in 1950s America. In this poem for instance, one of these critics may have found fault with the fact that the poem only addressed the speaker’s real situation vaguely and near the end, while spending much of the poem talking of a mythic western figure. In doing this, writing mythological and close to traditional European forms, writer and black activist Don L. Lee claimed that by using “their language … [Brooks] suffers by not communicating with the masses of black people.” Brooks would finally come to agree in 1967 when she attended the Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University, and from then on she wrote largely in free-verse, and went more directly at the emotional and political issues of racial injustice in America.

Throughout all of the criticism and change though, few could argue Brooks’s inherent skill and brilliance with language. American writer Stanley Kunitz commented that “Miss Brooks is particularly at home in the sonnet, where the tightness of the form forces her to consolidate her energies and to make a disciplined organization of her attitudes and feelings.” And always in her work were the moving portraits of families, cities, and other characters of the American landscape. As poet Langston Hughes noticed very early on in Brooks’s career, “the people and the poems [of] Gwendolyn Brooks … are alive, reaching, and very much of today.”

Criticism

Marisa Anne Pagnattaro

Marisa Anne Pagnattaro is writer and teaching assistant at the University of Georgia. In the following essay, Pagnattaro notes how, in altering the sonnet form, Brooks further emphasizes the contrast between the life of her subject with that of the movie’s hero.

The advent of “Strong Men, Riding Horses” in The Bean Eaters (1960), Gwendolyn Brooks’s third volume of poetry, marks the beginning of a shift in her literary career. Brooks was initially praised for her technical ability and for the clear images in her first two books, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949). For example, in his review of Annie Allen for Poetry magazine, critic Stanley Kuntz noted that “Brooks is particularly at home in the sonnet, where the tightness of the form forces her to consolidate her energies and to make a disciplined organization of her attitudes and feelings.” Brooks applied this technical expertise to very commonplace subject matter, drawing on what Langston Hughes called “the ordinary aspects of black life.” In 1949, Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen, becoming the first African American to be honored with the award for poetry.

The Bean Eaters, however, reflects what Brooks has called “a turning point, ‘politically’”—a slightly more critical look at black life in America. Accused by some of not confronting the plight of the black community and criticized by others of “forsaking lyricism for polemics,” this collection was met with a mixed reception by both black and white critics. “Strong Men, Riding Horses” is representative of Brooks’s more reflective posture. In this poem, Brooks breaks free of traditional form in her grim psychological portrait of one urban man’s experience. The title invokes an image of great physical power, of men confidently traveling on the backs of horses. Subtitled “Lester after the Western,” the poem opens with Lester’s unbridled enthusiasm for the mythic West. It is as if Lester has escaped into the movie theater for the afternoon, steeped himself in the hope of the frontier, and filled his mind with remnants of great gusto for a lost time. Lester’s own life, however, pales in comparison. He is embattled with trepidation and concerns over the practical and mundane.

Brooks seems to be playing with the sonnet in “Strong Men, Riding Horses,” manipulating this traditional form to make a social point about the contrast between the fictionalized promise of the frontier and urban reality. Instead of a single, fourteen-line stanza in iambic pentameter, Brooks has seventeen neatly divided lines. The first ten-line stanza re-creates the expansiveness of the West. This vista is then abruptly followed by a couplet that catapults the poem into the present. In these two lines, the poem becomes personal, contrasting Lester’s life with those of his heros’. The concluding stanza is half as long as the first, a mere five lines underscoring Lester’s failure to measure up to what he has seen on the big screen. This calculated breaking up of the sonnet form in favor of free verse challenges conventional expectations about the structure of Brooks’s poetry.

The first line of the poem echos the title, reiterating the power of the men in the movies. This stanza takes readers out of the pre-civil rights present of the poem and summons forth the mythic West. These American legends are on a “range five hundred miles” or, perhaps, it is a “Thousand.” Their world is expansive, “Reaching / From dawn to sunset.” Ostensibly, the cowboys’ life is full of freedom and possibility. The parallel structure in the next two lines further emphasizes the extremes between which the men operate: “Rested blue to orange. / From hope to crying.” They live life to the fullest extent. Lester is quick to point out that the Strong Men are “desert-eyed.” Coupled with the previous line, this observation seems to say that they could cry if they wanted to, but do not need to shed any tears. These men epitomize the American ideal of independence, unencumbered by earthly constraints. Moreover, the men are “Pasted to stars already,” as if to say that they are memorialized in the grandest celestial fashion. At this point, Lester cannot see through their unemotional facade.

In the second half of the first stanza, however, the tone becomes darker. The sudden intrusion of automobiles reels the poem into the twentieth century. The speaker says: “Have their cars / Beneath them.” This fragmentary thought—equating the horses with a contemporary mode of transportation—places the strong men in the present. It also signals the speaker’s edginess, which continues in the next phrase: “Rentless, too.” Not only are the strong men in command of their lives and their locomotion, they are not tied to a monthly demand for money. This first use of “too,” meaning also, is then contrasted with the repetition “too” meaning in excess of an amount that is desirable. This latter reference hints at what seems to be Lester’s irritation about the mythical men. They are “Too broad of chest / To shrink when the Rough Man hails. Too flailing / To redirect the Challenger, when the challenge / Nicks; slams; buttonholes. Too saddled.” These lines express Lester’s mounting ambivalence toward men who first appeared to be the subject of his respect and awe. This may also be Lester’s way of expressing his own resentment toward the stereotyped masculine ideal.

The couplet that separates the first and last stanzas is a first-person interjection of Lester into the poem. His abrupt confession is in sharp contrast to the strong men: “I am not like that. I pay rent, am addled / By illegible landlords, run, if robbers call.” Instead of being stoic and confident, Lester, by his own admission, is fearful. Brooks’s interesting choice of language—“addled” and “illegible”—suggests that the world is a muddled and confusing place for Lester. Additionally, the deliberate rhyming juxtaposition of “addled” with “saddled” separates Lester’s world of uncertainty from the security of the ensconced cowboys who sit tight when confronted by adversity. Lester is flighty; when faced with the deprivation of his property, he flees. Unlike the quintessential masculine American male from the Old West, he retreats from any possible battle.

What Do I Read Next?

An extensive selection of Brooks’s poems is collected in Blacks, available from Third World Press, Chicago, 1994.
Brooks is included in a 1989 anthology called An Ear To the Ground which celebrates a diverse selection of multicultural writers.
Margaret Abigail Walker is a lesser-known African-American poet contemporary to Brooks. Her book For My People, though more formally structured, overlaps some of the same thematic territories as the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
Brooks, Keorapete Kgositsile, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Dudley Randall each offer ideas relevant to younger black writers in their textbook A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (Broadside Press, 1977). Brooks initiated the project to cover issues normally excluded from the typically white-dominated classrooms at that time.

The third and final stanza provides a glimpse into Lester’s cowardly life. He offers insight into the persona he tries to project: “What mannerisms I present, employ, / Are camouflage.” Lester’s outward appearance is mere subterfuge for the insecurity that lurks below the veneer of his body language. Likewise, he says “what my mouths remark / To word-wall off that broadness of the dark / Is pitiful.” Lester is a big talker, but there is no internal fortitude to back up his rhetoric. He deems himself deserving of contempt, because he is “not brave at all.” This concluding line strikes to the core of Lester’s self-doubt and weakness.

At the end of “Strong Men, Riding Horses,” Brooks leaves readers to ponder Lester’s sense of hopelessness; she offers no indication that Lester will ever be able to rise above his present limited circumstances. This statement is particularly grim in light of the literary resonances in the poem. In 1931, Sterling A. Brown (1901 -1989) published the poem “Strong Men.” In an epigram at the beginning of the poem Brown quoted Carl Sandburg

“In this poem, Brooks breaks free of traditional form in her grim psychological portrait of one urban man’s experience.”

(1878-1967): “The strong men keep coming on.” As a folk poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Brown continues in Sandburg’s populist tradition, celebrating the working urban masses in this poem. Brown, however, invokes a different nineteenth-century landscape than Brooks. Instead of the manifest destiny of the West, Brown begins with the institution of slavery in the South. Unlike Brooks’s “Strong Men, Riding Horses,” this poem is a tribute to the ability to overcome great adversity. It opens with the horror of enslavement, “They dragged you from homeland, / They chained you in coffles,” yet concludes with a growing sense of power. Blacks may have been relegated to living in “slums” and segregated, “‘Reserved for whites only,’” but they are not defeated. The last stanza proclaims: “One thing they cannot prohibit—/ The strong men … coming on / The strong men gittin’ stronger. / Strong men …. / Stronger.…” This sense of building strength and hope is nowhere to be found at the end of Brooks’s poem.

The difference between Brown’s and Brooks’s “strong men” is indicative of Brooks’s overall lack of activism in her early career. Even though some critics thought The Bean Eaters was “getting too social,” many black critics felt that Brooks was not doing enough to directly address the concerns of the black community. As Don L. Lee observes in his essay “The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks,” even though Brooks was “deeply involved with black life” in her early work, she was “not communicating with masses of black people.” “Strong Men, Riding Horses” is particularly vulnerable to criticism that Brooks was continuing to write for a primarily white audience. In this poem, Brooks merely gives a glimpse into what appears to be the speaker’s unfocused rage about his circumstances. Lester’s “confessional” does little to confront the social roots of his limited existence. There is no real momentum for resistence or change.

The rudiments of a more political stance in Brooks’s poetry in The Bean Eaters were greatly enlarged after Brooks attended the 1967 Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in Nashville. Brooks describes how she was “‘loved’ at South Dakota State College,” but at Fisk she was “coldly Respected.” In her essay “The Field of the Fever, the Time of the Tall Walkers,” Brooks continues expounding on the evolution of her sensibility: “I—who have ‘gone the gamut’ from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress.” “Strong Men, Riding Horses” bears the beginnings of what would later develop into Brooks’s poetic and social activism. Èxcited by the energy of the black movement and its celebration of African heritage, Brooks entered a new consciousness in her work that far exceeded her pre-1967 poetry.

Source: Marisa Anne Pagnattaro, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, and is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky explores the symbolism of the American cowboy in “Strong Men, Riding Horses.”

Most of us are familar with myths, the stories cultures tell themselves to explain phenomena and reasons for why things happen. America also has its myths; for instance, the myth of the how the West was settled. In one version of this myth, cowboys represent the self-reliant, self-motivated pioneers who made their own way across the country, conquering hostile Indian tribes, dispensing justice as they saw fit, drinking black coffee, and sleeping under the desert stars. Macho, confident, and masters of their own world, cowboys embodied the spirit of adventure and freedom that came to characterize the American West. Gwendolyn Brooks uses both the figure and the myth of the cowboy in her poem “Strong Men, Riding Horses” as foils to underscore the powerlessness and despair of African Americans.

Lester, an inner-city black man and the speaker of “Strong Men,” muses on the life of the cowboy after watching a Western film. All of the images he details mark a stark contrast to his own life. Cowboys are strong men who live lives of possibility. Their home, the range, reaches from “Dawn to sunset. Rested blue to orange.” Lester is plainly awed by this. Cowboys have a natural entitlement to space. Embodying the stereotype of the macho man, they are “Too broad of chest / To shrink when the Rough Man hails.” Think of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, two icons of Western films. Invariably these actors play “desert-eyed” heroes who challenge or are challenged by an authority (the “Rough Man”) who is attempting to take away their freedom or space. Through cunning, wit, strength, and their own superior moral position they defeat the “Rough Man.” Lester, however, is “addled” by the “Rough Man”—for him “illegible landlords”—whereas cowboys are “saddled” and fearless in their cars. Cowboys represent the vastly superior white world for Lester, distant and unattainable.

Lester survives in a blighted urban environment, fearful of being robbed. Brooks views this syndrome as a kind of spiritual death because it induces a feeling of homelessness, of powerlessness. Compare this to where and how cowboys live. Writing of the meaning of the West (the cowboys’s “home”) in popular culture and film, Jane Tompkins in her West of Everything asserts:

The West functions as a symbol of freedom, and of the opportunity for conquest. It seems to offer escape from the conditions of life in modern industrial society; from a mechanized existence, economic dead ends, social entanglements, unhappy personal relations, personal injustice. The desire to change places [for the audience] also signals a powerful need for self-transformation. The desert light and the desert space, the creak of saddle leather and the sun beating down, the horses’ energy and force—these things promise a translation of the self into something purer and more authentic, more intense, more real.

The significance of these images is that although they are the stuff of Hollywood, one of the largest purveyors of myth and illusion in the modern world, Lester takes them seriously. However, instead of identifying with the cowboys in the movie, Lester compares himself to them, coming up short. “The effect of the contrast between Lester and the cowboys,” critic Harry Shaw notes in his study Gwendolyn Brooks, “is sharpened by the poem’s being presented from Lester’s point of view. This allows the poet to restate or distort reality in order to focus attention on ironies in the overall situation.” Irony, a popular literary device, is a way of meaning the opposite of what you say. Here, Lester is unintentionally ironic in describing his own verbal impotence:

What mannerisms I present, employ,
Are camouflage, and what my mouths remark
To word-wall off that broadness of the dark
Is pitiful.
I am not brave at all.

Although Lester feels inferior because he considers himself a rent-paying coward who is unable to articulate his own miserable situation we, as readers, can see through his self-deception and feel empathy for Lester, who is more real than the white cowboys he valorizes. It is his own efforts to appear courageous that we admire, not the phony behavior of the cowboys who, after all, are “pasted to stars.”

Another irony in Lester’s monologue is that although he sees himself as inarticulate the language he employs belies this. He speaks like a poet, not like the stereotype we have of the disadvantaged urban poor. He does not use slang or speak in a dialect, both of which are conventional features of monologues. Rather his speech has a clipped, formal quality which itself contrasts with the silent, monosyllabic utterances of the cowboy, and contrary to what he claims, what Lester says is not pitiful but straightforward and honest. We admire his vulnerability and do not believe him when he says, “I am not brave at all.”

Like other poems in The Bean Eaters, (1960), “Strong Men, Riding Horses” depicts characters despairing of their lives, who feel themselves trapped with little left to live for except their memories. The title poem of the collection describes a couple, “an old yellow pair,” who have resigned themselves to going forward, though they have nothing for which to hope. Like Lester, theirs is a rented existence. Shaw writes: “While The Bean Eaters contains more on survival than [Brooks’s] two previous books, it contains something on every major social theme …. the poetry is enriched by more complex themes than before, a development made possible and necessary by the mixture of efficient characterization and the presentation of a meaningful situation.”

In his A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, George Kent writes that “The universe of The Bean Eaters is a very complicated one. It has, when closely observed, numerous balances in the consideration of its issues: the racial and the intraracial; the social and the metaphysical; the individual and the group. The tumultuous outer universe is comprised of the tearing flesh and blood in Chicago and in the nation as a whole.”

“Strong Men, Riding Horses” succeeds because like much conventionally successful poetry, it shows—not tells—us who the speaker is. When writers do this, they are practicing characterization. When such a technique works it is because readers are left to discover the meaning of the character’s actions rather having the meaning spelled out for them by the author. This shows respect for the readers, because it asks them to infer things about characters by how they act.

“Strong Men” has been much anthologized because it, like much of Brooks’s later poetry, demonstrates how blacks have come to internalize white oppression by letting it configure the very ways they think about themselves. It is apropos that Lester responds to cowboys, for although they have been romanticized as freedom-loving individualists, in reality many of them actively participated in the genocide and oppression of Native Americans.

Brooks frequently uses subjects of popular culture in her poetry as vehicles for addressing social themes. Sometimes, however, readers do not understand her point. Shaw notes that sometimes these subjects “are so innocent or asocial in appearance that they may beguile the unperceptive reader into a superficial reading and, therefore, perhaps a superficial appreciation, missing the heart of the poetry’s black message.” This might be especially true of non-black readers who, because they themselves have not experienced the world as Lester has, might have difficulty seeing the irony of her poem. Such readers might instead focus on Lester’s lack of self-esteem and see the poem more as a lament of a life not lived rather than an indictment of the social relations which have oppressed and continue to oppress a large segment of the American population. This, of course, would be most ironic of all.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Sources

Brooks, Gwendolyn, interview with Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, New York: Continuum, 1983, pp. 39-48.

_______, interview by George Stavros, Contemporary Literature 1970, pp. 1-20.

_______, “The Field of the Fever, the Time of the Tall-Walkers,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited Mari Evans, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1984, reprinted from Report from Part One: An Autobiography by Gwendolyn Brooks Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972.

Hughes, Langston, “Name, Race, and Gift in Common,” in Voices, No. 140, Winter, 1950, pp. 54-6.

Kent, George E., A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Kunitz, Stanley, “Bronze by Gold,” in Poetry, Vol. 76, No. 1, April 1950, pp. 52-6.

Lee, Don L., “The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks,” The Black Scholar, Vol. 3, No. 10, Summer 1972, pp. 32-41.

Shaw, Harry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.

Tompkins, Jane, West of Everything, London: Oxford University Press, 1990.

For Further Study

Clark, Norris, A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Clark combines author biography with a close and comprehensive reading of Brooks’s work to give us a picture of the poet within a broader social context.

Kent, George, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, University of Kentucky Press, 1990.