Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most highly regarded American poets of the 21st century. During her life, Brooks won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, which was a first for a Black American. Her poem “Ulysses” was included in her 1991 collection, Children Coming Home. This collection includes short dramatic monologues from the perspective of boys and girls from Chicago’s South Side. Out of all of Brooks’s collections, "Ulysses" is one of the least known and is often overlooked in critical thought.

Using Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey as inspiration, Brooks frames the story of a young black boy as if he were a war hero struggling to come home while also emphasizing the mundane domestic life that creates such violence for black children.

Poet Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. When she was six weeks old, her family moved to the South Side of Chicago during the Great Migration. Her dad was a janitor who had hoped to be a doctor, and her mother was a school teacher and a concert pianist. Brooks was the oldest of two children. For the rest of her life, Brooks lived in Chicago, a city with which she and her poetry are strongly associated.

Encouraged by her mother, Brooks began her writing career at an early age. From the age of six, she kept detailed journals, determined to record the Black experience. Her first poem, “Eventide,” was published in the children’s magazine American Childhood when she was 13. Sure of her future fame as one of the best American poets, she buried a sheaf of poetry in her backyard to one day be discovered. By 16, she had published 75 poems.

During her high school education, Brooks attended both integrated and all-black high schools. As a result, Brooks had a keen understanding of racial injustice and prejudice. By her high school graduation in 1935, Brooks was a regular contributor to the poetry column in the prominent Black periodical, The Chicago Defender. She received commendations and encouragement from other Black writers including James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes.

As Brooks knew she wanted to be a writer, she thought a four-year college degree was unnecessary. Instead, she earned a two-year degree from Wilson Junior College in 1936. She worked as a typist to support herself.

Brooks met Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr, after they joined Chicago’s NAACP Youth Council. In 1939, they married. They had two children, son Henry and daughter Nora.

In 1941, Brooks started participating in poetry workshops where she refined her poetic voice and technique. At a session organized by Inez Cunningham Stark at the South Side Community Art Center, Brooks read her poem “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee” for poet Langston Hughes. In 1944, two of her poems were published in Poetry magazine, which was a life-long goal.

Brooks published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), which became an immediate critical success. The collection’s rich portrayal of the Bronzeville neighborhood garnered particular praise. The next year, she received her first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946. In addition, she was included as one of the "Ten Young Women of the Year" in Mademoiselle magazine.

In 1949, Brooks published her second book of poetry, Annie Allen. This collection focused on the coming-of-age story of a young Black girl in Bronzeville. For this collection, she was awarded the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Brooks was the first Black author to win the prize.

Brooks published her first and only prose book, Maud Martha in 1953. This novella features 34 vignettes from the life of Maud Martha Brown, a black woman, as she grows from childhood to adulthood. The work demonstrates Brooks’s criticism of racism and sexism, and her portrayal of the resulting rage, bitterness, and self-hatred.

From 1961 to 1964, while her son served in the U.S. Marine Corps, Brooks mentored her son’s fiancée in poetry writing. Brooks immensely enjoyed mentoring. As a result, she began to more frequently mentor other young Black poets.

From then on, she began to teach extensively. She had her first teaching experience at the University of Chicago before also teaching and holding posts at Columbia College Chicago, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, and the City College of New York, among others.

Brooks attended the Second Black Writers’ Conference in Nashville in 1967. This experience informed both her poetry and Brooks’s future mentoring and teaching. Here, she was introduced to Black nationalism and began her association with the Black Arts Movement.

In 1968, 10 years after the publication of her previous poetry collection, she published one of her most famous works, In the Mecca. This long poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building was her first work that openly criticized Chicago. The poem was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry. That same year, she began serving as the Poet Laureate for the State of Illinois, a position she held until her death.

Her autobiographical books, Report from Part One and Report from Part Two, were published in 1972 and 1975, respectively. These books include reminiscences, interviews, short stories, and photos.

In 1976 Brooks became the first Black woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1985 and 1986, Brooks was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, which would later be a position called the U.S. Poet Laureate. She was the first Black woman to hold this position.

Her husband died in 1996. Four years later, on December 3, 2000, Gwendolyn Brooks died at her Chicago home at age 83.

Poem Text

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Ulysses.” African American Registry. 

Summary

The narrator of the poem, a young boy named Ulysses, outlines his daily routine. First, while at home, he prays and sings with his family. They give thanks, saying "hallelujah" (Line 4). Then, they leave for the day. He observes his father hastening to his girlfriend, while his mother, a "Boss" (Line 7) and a lesbian, also has a girlfriend.  dad goes to visit his girlfriend, and his mom. Ulysses and his siblings go to school and “bring knives pistols bottles, little boxes, and cans” (Line 10) along with them. At school, they talk to “the man who’s cool at the playground gate” (Line 11). While at school, Ulysses and his siblings are unsupervised and feels that they and their mistakes are unseen. While the teachers try to educate them, the students hurry through the lessons, eager to leave. Ulysses and his family return home, once again praying and singing together "in, a circle" (Line 17), giving thanks.