摘要
Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet sequence,“Gay Chaps at the Bar”is written in compliance with the esoteric literary ideas of the followers of A.R.Orage.Thus each sonnet contains a verifiable intentional mistake,a series of literary allusions,and an esoteric idea.These mistakes have been previously undetected.Most of the allusions have been have been overlooked by critics.The sonnets are also written in the phonetic code used by alchemists.The material that Brooks drew on for her allusions consists of works of popular culture,and literary classics,so that there is nothing erudite about her references.On the other hand,the esoteric ideas are extremely obscure.This close reading is a severe departure from readings which have treated the poems as social protest and experiments in a so-called Afro-Modernist aesthetic.The new aesthetic of“objective literature”raises many questions about the nature of art,reading,and consciousness.
