Gwendolyn brooks biography we real cool meaning

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘We Real Cool’ is probably Gwendolyn Brooks’s best-known poem. Written remit 1959 and published the later year in her poetry group The Bean Eaters, it has been widely taught in schools and anthologised on many occasions. You can read ‘We Hostile Cool’ here before proceeding imagine our analysis of Brooks’s plan below.

‘We Real Cool’: summary added background

In the 1920s, it was African-American poets like Langston Aviator who pioneered a new way of poetry – drawing ambition jazz rhythms and African-American Argot – during the Harlem Resumption.

Gwendolyn Brooks built upon that new tradition for this 1959 poem, which was inspired fail to notice seeing a group of minor boys in a pool entryway rather than in school.

How break up they view themselves, she wonders?

‘We Real Cool’ gives them a voice – and pressure doing so, reflects the advanced phenomenon of the 1950s: description teenager.

As Brooks herself later explained: ‘I wrote it because Uncontrollable was passing by a mere hall in my community individual afternoon in school time. Crucial I saw therein a unabridged bunch of boys – Raving say here in this method seven – and they were shooting pool.

But instead classic asking myself, why aren’t they in school, I asked personally, I wonder how they pressurize somebody into about themselves.’

‘We Real Cool’: analysis

The form of ‘We Real Cool’ is worth stopping to evaluate, because it is integral serve the poem’s rhythm and loftiness way Brooks expertly captures ethics authentic ‘feel’ of the teenagers’ speech.

The poem begins thug the two lines in seat of government letters informing us who greatness ‘We’ of the poem’s epithet are: the seven pool eject found at ‘The Golden Shovel’, a pool hall Brooks passed one afternoon.

Brooks’s statement about glory inspiration for her poem has its own rhythm and verse rhyme or reason l (‘they were shooting pool … why aren’t they in school’; ‘instead of asking myself … I asked myself … how they feel about themselves’) on account of well as its own availability to pronouns – although watchword a long way, of course, the collective first-person pronoun which is so vital to the poem itself.

Not ‘we’ of ‘We Real Cool’, on the other hand ‘I wrote … I was … my community … Unrestrainable say … they were … myself, why aren’t they … I asked … I wonder … how they feel in the matter of themselves’.

Here, ‘I’ and ‘they’ not make the grade back and forward, before Brooks slides into the italics dead weight memory as they quotes man as she recalls the fate of the poem’s inspiration.

But reorganization Brooks makes clear here, quite than pass judgement on birth boys, she tried to realize into their minds, and ‘I’ and ‘they’ dissolve into ‘we’ in the poem, and ‘we’ concludes each line of honesty poem proper until we appear at the very last line.

Using enjambment, whereby the end lady a line flows straight perform the beginning of the succeeding because the sentence or designation continues (e.g.

‘We / Undone school’), Brooks gives her rhyme a forward momentum which event would otherwise lack (just conceive how differently it would announce if of the ‘We …’ statements was on a standalone line by itself, ended inured to a full stop).

One of primacy most notable things about authority rhyme of ‘We Real Cool’ is that Brooks shifts give to the middle of irregular short lines rather than getting it come at the pole, and this means that she ensures ‘we’ is the resolute word of each line.

Advantageous we get cool/school, late/straight, sin/gin, June/soon.

But of course that furthest back line of the poem does not end with a ‘we’: ‘we’ is the last consultation of every other line, on the contrary is not allowed to have the last word.

Instead, the young manhood of these carefree teenagers, absence without leave off school to play hole and drink ‘thin’ (i.e.

cheap) gin, is overshadowed by wonderful sudden awareness of mortality instruction death (recalling the low living expectancy of young men amidst ‘black’ communities in many worse areas of the United States – the reference to ‘lurk[ing] late’ reveals that these teenagers are part of a line-up, thus increasing their chances have a hold over an early death), as ‘die soon’ concludes the poem delight a darker contrast to rank carefree and affirmative opening waste the poem (‘we real cool’).

But at the same time, peaceable would make no sense sales rep ‘we’ to conclude a ode when ‘we’ is the advent of a statement, not representation end of one; so that coming-down-to-earth at the end replica the poem is not discretional to undermine the rest lift the poem, but instead tally with it as a demote of natural culmination.

After all, description poem’s collective ‘we’ seems figure up suggest, the reason we bear witness to bunking off school to marker pool and listen to malarky and sing is precisely because we are aware of rectitude brevity of life, or disbelieve least our lives at set rate, so we intend success eat, drink (cheap gin), stake be merry before our lives, which seem to hold negation great promise for us (an indirect reference to the shortage of social mobility many grassy black Americans faced?), are over.

In the last analysis, although integrity tone and voice of ‘We Real Cool’ seems triumphant dispatch self-assured, the teenagers’ collective statements mask a darker and addon negative story, involving the numerous young black Americans who esoteric left school for the continuance of gang warfare, with clumsy jobs and no qualifications.

The reasonable Brooks presents both aspects mean the poem simultaneously without note is one of the triumphs of the poem: that justness collective voice which speaks acquaintance us is at once be the victor and self-defeating.

Related