Love's Emblem Lost

In his excellent study, Baraka: The Renegade and Mask, Kimberly Benston tells us that, in Preface a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.... , there are scattered remarks and allusions that indicate poet might be black or have a particular interest in black people, and, he continues, it is only with final poem, 'Notes for a Speech,' that Baraka comes terms with his isolation and despair as a specifically black individual.l It is not, Benston suggests, until The Dead Lecturer and A Poem for Willie Best that we get Baraka's first sustained attempt answer his own call for black writers tap the emotional history of black man in this country as its victim and chronicler and, in doing so, to propose his own symbols, erect his own personal myths.2 It is, I think, true that poet's first explicit attempt discover fundamental black mythologies and recreate, through an historical figure, a comprehensible history is A Poem for Willie Best. But I should like draw attention again a poem within Preface itself suggest that leap from Preface The Dead Lecturer, and perhaps even from Jones Baraka, may not be as great a distance as we have supposed, nor even of as much moment as we have supposed. Certainly, poet of A Poem for Willie Best has new artistic

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