Thomas and Beulah
by Rita Dove
Summary
Thomas and Beulah tells the story of a marriage across two linked sequences of poems, one voiced from the perspective of Thomas, the other from Beulah, loosely based on the lives of Rita Dove's own maternal grandparents. The two sequences cover the same decades of a shared life, from the Great Migration north out of the rural South, through the couple's years together in an industrial Midwestern city, into old age and death, but each section tells that history from inside one person's experience, so that the same marriage reads differently depending on which spouse the reader has just left.
Dove works in short, image dense lyrics rather than a continuous narrative, each poem fixed on a single concrete moment, a train platform, a factory floor, a kitchen, rather than summarizing years at a stretch. That compression lets ordinary domestic incidents carry the weight of larger twentieth century history, the Great Migration, industrial labor, the slow arrival of the civil rights era, without the poems ever announcing themselves as historical. The two voices Dove builds for Thomas and Beulah differ enough in rhythm and vocabulary that the book reads almost like two interleaved memoirs rather than one.
Reading Thomas and Beulah means piecing together a single marriage from two incomplete, sometimes contradictory accounts, since neither spouse fully understands what the other one felt. It suits a reader drawn to poetry that treats an ordinary Black working family's life as material for serious historical memory, and to a structure that trusts silence and juxtaposition to do work a more explicit narrative would have to state outright.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Rita Dove the 1987 Prize for Poetry for Thomas and Beulah, making her the second African American poet to win the award, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950, over finalists that included Hayden Carruth's The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth and Charles Simic's Unending Blues. Dove was thirty four at the time, already established through Fulbright study in Germany and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Six years later, in 1993, Dove became United States Poet Laureate, the first African American appointed to the post since its name changed from Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, and at forty she remains the youngest poet to hold the title. She has taught at the University of Virginia since 1989, and critics including Helen Vendler have engaged closely, sometimes critically, with her later editorial choices as an anthologist, a sign of how central her judgment had become to the field.