A Study Of The Jazz Complex In Amiri Baraka’s Poetry

Amiri Baraka is a significant African American poet,playwright and music critic in the 20_thcentury.In Baraka’s lifetime,political ideals,literature and art complement with each other,making outstanding contributions to the black literature,black politic and art movement.On the basis of black aesthetics,the revolutionary black literature and black music tradition,this thesis applies methods of text close reading to emplore Baraka’s jazz complex in his poetry.By further exploring the specific embodiment of jazz elements in Baraka’s poetry creation,it highlights the strong jazz mood in his poetry.This thesis holds that the jazz complex in Baraka’s poetry refers to the deep integration of black jazz music and black social politics and art movement,from which the spiritual aesthetic value and social functional value in his poetry are fully manifested.His poetry text and live poetry reading performance with jazz bands are analyzed in this thesis,and then the jazz complex in Baraka’s poetry is explored.The research shows that the jazz complex in Baraka’s poetry is manifested in the spiritual aesthetic value of it on the one hand,mainly reflected in the vanguard jazz improvisation with blues poetic lines,the call-and-response with collective consciousness,and the revolutionary scat singing with black vernacular in Baraka’s poems.It not only promotes personal free expression,provides a nostalgic spiritual shelter for black people,but also improves the national consciousness and cultural confidence for them.On the other hand,the jazz complex in Baraka’s poetry is mainly embodied in the social functional value,related to the poet’s identity construction—from a beat poet to a radical black nationalist to revolutionary Marxist in Baraka’s poems,not only helping to construct a unique black creation and evaluation standard independent of the mainstream American literature and art,but also promoting the freedom and equality of black rights,and the development of the Marxist proletariat.Throughout Baraka’s legendary life,his changing identities and his steadfast black political and artistic ideals coincide with“the changing same”of the improvisation of jazz.The jazz complex in Baraka’s poetry skillfully integrates music and poetry,which not only facilitates the development of postmodernist poetics towards visual and sound direction,but also provides a useful reference for black national cultural confidence,social freedom and equality of the working class.