In his influential sociological study The Lonely Crowd, Riesman summarizes the content of American culture in the decade after World War II. He cites the inner-directed attitude "toward generalized but nonetheless inescapably destined goals" (Riesman 15). More pervasive, he argues, is the attitude of the other-directed person, who takes his life cues not from his inner spark but from others. The other-directed do not so much seek others' adulation as "respect and, more than the respect, the affection, of an amorphous and shifting, though contemporary, jury of peers"(Riesman 137). That was mainstream American society in the 1950s. Everybody just wanted to get along.
Except those who were not like all the others--even in 1950s @merica. In part Brooks's different drummer can be attributed to her ethnicity, hence enforced social marginalization. But in mid-century America the fact was that aspirations of in all classes and races tended toward white/bourgeois respectability. By the 1960s, of course, nonconformity with peer approval was to become institutionalized in its own way, as the Civil Rights Movement led the way against the norms of US stratification. Even so, at the time Gwendolyn Brooks wrote "First Fight. Then Fiddle" and "A Song in the Front Yard," to consider departing from social norms was a major social and even personal risk.
In the American fifties, it famously belonged to poets and other artists to take those risks, which helps explain avant-garde artistry in general. Equally, it turned out to belong to such people as Dr. King, who organized the famous 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., which launched the Civil Rights Movement (King passim). Even so, poets had prepared the way rhetori-
cally. Brooks's poems belong to the rhetoric of preparation.
In Brooks's poems, the poet seeks group affiliation, but not that of convention and peer approval or values. In "Yard," the poet articulates a vision of a life other ...