By many, poetry is looked upon as being a language of its own. It’s a way of creatively expressing unique emotions, thoughts, and beliefs with the use of many literary devices. American poetry has been the most important form of writing throughout history. Many famous authors, such as Lucille Clifton, used poetry to document the most major times in history in which they lived, such as the Feminist Movement in the 1960s.
During this time, women experienced a significant amount of gender discrimination and harassment, which inspired Lucille Clifton to incorporporate metaphors, similes, and symbolism in many of her poems to raise awareness about the power of women. Named after her great-grandmother, Thelma Lucille Clifton was introduced to the world on June 27, 1936, in the town of Depew, New York by her father, Samuel L. Sayles, and her mother, Thelma Moore Sayles. Clifton was a descendent of Caroline Donald Sale, a woman who was born in Africa but later died free in America.
Clifton’s ancestors were owned by the Sales family in Bedford Virginia. After the Civil War, her family decided to change their name from “Sale” to “Sayle” to easily distinguish their family from the white family. Clifton’s grandmother, whom she was named after, was known as the first African American woman to be legally hung in Virginia after the murder of her white grandfather, Harvey Nichols. Decades later, her father decided to change his family’s name to “Sayles” to make clear that there will be more than one Sayle to continue his family’s legacy.
Her parents were mildly educated being that neither of them completed elementary school. Her mother worked as a launderer and homemaker, and her father was employed in a steel mill in New York. Clifton’s mother showed a great fascination in poetry but unfortunately, her relatives did not approve of this hobby. As a result, her mother burned all of her poems and stopped writing. Although “neither parents were formally educated, they provided their large family with an appreciation and an abundance of books, especially by African Americans”(Moody).
When Clifton was a little girl, her family moved to Purdy Street in Buffalo, New York in which she reflected various amounts of childhood events in her poems. Clifton attended Fosdick-Mason Park High School where she successfully earned a scholarship from her church to Howard University in Washington D. C.. At the young age of sixteen, Clifton applied to Howard where she chose to major in drama. At the university, she worked with Sterling Allen Brown, a professor who studied the culture of Southern America, along with A. B. Spellman and Toni Morrison who further edited her writings for a paperback publisher, Random House.
The people Clifton grew up with back at home, like at church and in her family, never attended college which caused Clifton to be nervous to leave home to attend school because she is the first one to go off to college. Lucille Clifton believed that it was not a necessity that she studied in college, resulting in the loss of her scholarship and the incompletion of her major. Later, Clifton returned to Buffalo and joined the Fredonia State Teachers College where she met with an African American Group to read and rehearse plays.
Around this time, she began writing and her creation were then presented to Langston Hughes by Ishmael Reed. Langston Hughes included a series of her poems in his compendium, Poetry of the Negro. In 1958, Clifton married her husband, Fred James Clifton, who was also a member of the Teachers College. Within 7 years of marriage, they conceived 6 children; Sydney, Alexia, Fredrica, Channing, Gillian, and Graham. Even though Clifton had many people to look after, her family nor her job as a claims clerk ceased her writing. In the 1960s, Clifton’s writing began to become very popular worldwide.
More of her work began to be publicized. She released a series of poems reflecting on her childhood, some pertaining to the effect of her mother’s continuous seizures on her family. Later on in the year on 1969, she won the Discovery Award, an award in which is presented to undiscovered poets. Also, her first anthology, Good Times, was published by Random House and was cited as one of the 10 best books of the year by New York Times. In 1972, her second anthology of poems, Good News About the Earth, was published identifying the political and social changes in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1974, she published poems reflecting on her experience as a poet and a woman in society named, An Ordinary Woman. Also, during the 1970s, Clifton wrote a series of children’s books which included the topics of “love, hope and dignity” (The Famous People) and in which celebrated the African-American culture. After the death of her husband in 1984, Clifton accepted the job as an professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she remained until 1989. In 1998, she was named the Blackburn Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Lucille Clifton’s writings were inspired by many social factors that created an enormous change in the United States. One of the most important being the Civil Rights Movement in which occurred in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement brought many people of various races together to fight for equality of all people in the United States. Even though the year 1863 marked the official end of slavery, it failed to end discrimination among nonwhite races. The rights of many people were neglected based solely upon the color of their skin (The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s).
Although the Civil Rights Movement was one of the most important, Clifton’s writing were mostly related to the equality of women in society. During the fight for equality amongst races, the rights of women were neglected. In the 1960s, women’s roles in society was extremely overlooked. Women were expected to live a harshly restricted lifestyle and by how society expected them to be. The job of staying home, taking care of the house, and raising babies was not the ideal lifestyle that women wanted.
Many women felt as though they should be treated equally to men, meaning they should be able to hold jobs and be more independent. These desires sparked the 1960s Feminist Movement. The progression of the Women’s Rights Movement moved within stages, one being the Women’s Suffrage Movement. This was a movement that helped create opportunities for women and earn their right to vote. Feminist then outlined The Seneca Falls Declaration which petitioned the “natural equality of women and outlining the political strategy of equal access and opportunity”.
Successfully, congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment permitting women the right to vote. From the 1960s-90s, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the second stage, simply had the job to enhance the lives of women. This movement discussed reproductive rights of women, as well as sexual harassment and violence towards them. As a result, women were better educated about reproduction and was introduced to birth control pills. Also, laws were passed granting women equal opportunity for education and protecting them from discrimination based on gender.
During their fight for equality, women endured a tremendous amount of sexual harassment leading to Third Wave Feminism. This stage’s purpose was to end the “stereotypes, media portrayal, and language to define women”(Third Wave Feminism). Also, this movement “challenges previously accepted definitions of beauty and femininity, and continues to fight for equal rights”(The Feminist Movement). Inspired by the characteristics of AfricanAmerican women, Lucille Clifton’s poems are solely based upon the strength and problems that African American women endured on a day to day bases.
Living in an era of many social and political issues, such as the feminist movement, Clifton’s work emphasises the pride she holds of being a black woman in society. Her free-verse poems celebrates the true beauty of women in the black community while ignoring the social prejudice and gender discrimination placed upon women. Clifton’s poem, “Homage to My Hips”, is a poem simply celebrating the hips of a woman. Clifton uses her “hips” as a form of symbolism to highlight the strengths that women possess in the world.
Clifton notes; “These hips are big hips. they need space to move around in / they don’t fit into little petty places. these hips / are free hips”(1-6). Clifton is strongly using the symbolism of hips to illustrate that women should not be belittled just because they are women. Also, she wants people to understand that women should have the equal opportunities that men have in society. Throughout lines 7-10, Clifton explains, “they don’t like to be held back. / these hips have never been enslaved, / they go where they want to go / they do what they want to do”. Clifton believes that nothing can stop a woman from doing whatever she wants to do.
It is evident that she believes women have the power to control their own lives despite the disapproval of others. In lines 11-15, the tone of the poem strongly shifts from Clifton’s aggressiveness, to more of a softer, subdued tone. Clifton ends the poem with, “these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips. / i have known them / to put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top”. This emphasizes the power women possess over men and their ability to control men in order to receive what they are longing for. Clifton’s literary piece, “Lorena”, uses many literary devices to also express the power of women compared to men.
Clifton begins the poem with, “it lay in my palm soft and trembled / as a new bird and i thought about / authority and how it always insisted / on itself”(1-4). Within these lines, the most noticeable thing Clifton does is compare two opposite things to each other; birds and authorities. Birds are recognized as a symbol of freedom, but in this case, since she is holding onto the bird, her hands symbolizes the restriction placed among humans by authorities. “how it was master / of the man, how it measured him, never / was ignored or denied, and how it promised / there ould be sweetness if it was obeyed / just like the saints do”(4-8).
Noticeably, Clifton fails to recognize each thing by what it is. Instead she repeatedly uses “it” to easily establish the two things that she is comparing. She also fails to incorporate gender in these lines to indicate the inequality between the two. Most likely in this poem, the bird could represent women and her hand, or authorities, could represent men in society. This is because the lives of women were very much restricted. Men represented a sense of authority in society meaning they controlled many things making it impossible for women to have a say-so.
