wiz-icon
MyQuestionIcon
MyQuestionIcon
2
You visited us 2 times! Enjoying our articles? Unlock Full Access!
Question

Read the passage to answer the question:
If the 1950s was a sparse period for Black poetry, the 1960s more than compensated for it; during the 1960s, Black poets appeared all over the United States. By the end of the decade not only had poetic giants such as Melvin Tolson, LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes reappeared with new volumes of poetry, but also at least five anthologies of Black poetry were published. Some of the new Black poets made their debuts in the anthologies. Others were first published in Harlem's new avant-garde literary publication, Umbra. As the decade drew to a close, the "Broadside Press" poets appeared through Dudley Randall's series of Broadside Press editions and in Hoyt Fuller's Negro Digest, which was later known as Black World. These poets brought with them new poetic concepts, a new aesthetic, and a strong awareness of the Black ghetto experience.

Like the spirituals and the secular songs of slavery, the new Black poetry burst forth out of a time of racial turmoil. The catalyst for creativity was a series of events beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott and encompassing the nonviolent sit-in demonstrations of the early 1960s and big-city riots of the mid-1960s. Behind the poets and their songs of bitter protest against racism in America, were the bombings, the assassinations, the burning ghettos, the screaming sirens, the violent confrontations, and the cruel awareness of spreading Black poverty amid white affluence.

The most forthrightly militant representatives of the new Black mood in poetry were the Broadside Press poets, so called because their poems are social, political, and moral broadsides protesting against the body politic and the establishment. Before the Broadside Press poets emerged as a definable literary group, other poets had written protest poetry in the early 1960s that was caustic, bitter, and at times mordantly cynical. But the poetry became more than bitter militant protest. Under the leadership of LeRoi Jones and others, there developed a Black aesthetic that, in one measure, prescribed the guidelines for Black poetic militancy. Under the racial pressures of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jones himself had undergone a metamorphosis, moving from an avant-garde aestheticism to a Black nationalism-activism.

In the process, he abandoned his "slave" name and became ImamuAmiri Baraka. He also moved out of the deep melancholy and pessimism that permeate many of his earlier poems. His "Black Art" indicates that his pessimism was replaced by a vigilant and militant activism. Indeed, "Black Art" announces the credo of the new Black aesthetic - that the direct objective of all Black artistic expression is to achieve social change and moral and political revolution. Poems, Jones asserts, should be "fists and daggers and pistols to clean up the sordid Blackworld for virtue and love."


It can be inferred from the passage that the Broadside Press poets believed that poetry primarily should be:


A
Rebellious
No worries! We‘ve got your back. Try BYJU‘S free classes today!
B
Acerbic
No worries! We‘ve got your back. Try BYJU‘S free classes today!
C
Aesthetic
No worries! We‘ve got your back. Try BYJU‘S free classes today!
D
Escapist
No worries! We‘ve got your back. Try BYJU‘S free classes today!
E
Remonstrative
Right on! Give the BNAT exam to get a 100% scholarship for BYJUS courses
Open in App
Solution

The correct option is E Remonstrative
Option (e) is the correct answer. Check the video for the approach.

flag
Suggest Corrections
thumbs-up
0
similar_icon
Similar questions
Q. Joseph Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle is not the first excellent study of Black soldiers and their White officers in the Civil War, but it uses more soldiers’ letters and diaries—including rare material from Black soldiers—and concentrates more intensely on Black-White relations in Black regiments than do any of its predecessors. Glatthaar’s title expresses his thesis: loyalty, friendship, and respect among White officers and Black soldiers were fostered by the mutual dangers they faced in combat.
Glatthaar accurately describes the government’s discriminatory treatment of Black soldiers in pay, promotion, medical care, and job assignments, appropriately emphasizing the campaign by Black soldiers and their officers to get the opportunity to fight. That chance remained limited throughout the war by army policies that kept most Black units serving in rear-echelon assignments and working in labor battalions. Thus, while their combat death rate was only one-third that of White units, their mortality rate from disease, a major killer in his war, was twice as great. Despite these obstacles, the courage and effectiveness of several Black units in combat won increasing respect from initially skeptical or hostile White soldiers. As one White officer put it, “they have fought their way into the respect of all the army.” In trying to demonstrate the magnitude of this attitudinal change, however, Glatthaar seems to exaggerate the prewar racism of the White men who became officers in Black regiments. “Prior to the war,” he writes of these men, “virtually all of them held powerful racial prejudices.” While perhaps true of those officers who joined Black units for promotion or other self-serving motives, this statement misrepresents the attitudes of the many abolitionists who became officers in Black regiments. Having spent years fighting against the race prejudice endemic in American society, they participated eagerly in this military experiment, which they hoped would help African Americans achieve freedom and postwar civil equality. By current standards of racial egalitarianism, these men’s paternalism toward African Americans was racist. But to call their feelings “powerful racial prejudices” is to indulge in generational chauvinism—to judge past eras by present standards
Q. The passage suggests that which of the following was true of Black units’ disease mortality rates in the Civil War?
View More
Join BYJU'S Learning Program
similar_icon
Related Videos
thumbnail
lock
India’s Relations with the African Continent
CIVICS
Watch in App
Join BYJU'S Learning Program
CrossIcon