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    A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks"
    A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks"
    A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks"
    Ebook34 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535831338
    A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Leopold Sedar Senghor's "Prayer to the Masks" - Gale

      information.

      Prayer to the Masks

      Léopold Sédar Senghor

      1945

      Introduction

      Over the course of his long career as a writer, philosopher, and statesman, the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor inspired countless young writers throughout the French-speaking world. Along with Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas, he founded the negritude movement, which argued that the black people of colonial Africa and the Caribbean should take pride in their African roots and find in their native traditions an inspiration for a new literature and a new way of life. Senghor put these ideas into practice in his wide field of activity. He wrote voluminously as a poet and as a philosopher of the new culture and politics of African independence from colonial rule. In the political arena, he was one of the major architects of independence for his own country, Senegal, and for French West Africa more generally. He served as president of Senegal for two decades.

      Prayer to the Masks is typical of Senghor's writing throughout his long career, although it comes from his first collection, Songs of the Shadow, published in 1945. It exhibits clearly the features that characterized his poetic writing: the use of African themes and settings, the highly rhythmic long lines reminiscent of the Bible and Walt Whitman, the evocations of music and song, and the contrast of the vitality of a mythic (and future) Africa with the present of both Europe and Africa under colonialism. It is the poem of a young man seeking to connect with the past; he senses that this connection will inspire him to struggle through the damaged life of the present to forge a better future for himself and his people.

      Author Biography

      Senghor was born in Joal, a village in Central Senegal, in 1906. His father was a successful merchant dealing with the French in goods for the export trade. After one year of elementary education in

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