Essay about Analysis of We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

     Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black community, particularly in the community’s vision of itself. The first African American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize; she was considered one of America’s most distinguished poets well before the age of fifty. Known for her technical artistry, she has succeeded in forms as disparate as Italian terza rima and the blues. She has been praised for her wisdom and insight into the African Experience in America. Her works reflect both the paradises and the hells of the black people of the world. Her writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. Although the

The different groups of people within the poem represent the different stages of life. At the beginning of the poem it talks about a young boy and his dog and swimmers. Several lines down it talks about “young lovers” and then families.

“We Real Cool," by Gwendolyn Brooks is a fervent short poem that tells a story of teenage rebellion. This poem is a formal verse ballad which uses simple sentences that create a steady meter giving the poem a catchy jazz like quality. Although the poem is short, it packs a powerful message about youth. Gwendolyn Brooks centered her works predominately around the African American consciousness. During the 1960’s when the poem was written, many teens especially young African-American men felt misunderstood and like the world was set up for them to fail. On the surface, it appears this poem is a mere description of young adults that are misjudged. The deeper message of this poem addresses the dangers of peer pressure, and its detrimental effects to self-identity because of the disconnect between society and youth of that time.

He uses the term “we” to refer to all people, so that his comparison becomes universal. The metaphor reintroduces the idea that in the end all people are the same. In the desert, without water, money, or a place to sleep, we are all stripped of what would otherwise define us in society, and instead we are all equal. Any and all divisions are abandoned when survival is on the line. This ties to the meaning because in these situations, we must band together to figure out how to survive and make the best out of the situation.

This poem describes the lifestyle of young rebels. They are "cool' having left "school", and "die soon." The seven

Although there are a number of different facets regarding the careers and works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost, there are a number of similarities between their respective poems "We Real Cool" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay". These similarities become all the more apparent when one attempts to compare the imagery of these poems. A careful consideration of this comparison indicates that the imagery of each of these poems is preoccupied with the concept of time in various aspects of its ephemeral nature, which ultimately reveals itself in a common theme of the untimely transition of youth to a state of death.

Since it does, when reading each line, there is a resilient connection that allows the reader to put together and feel for what the narrator is speaking of. As each line is metrically linked, the words are further recited in a durable voice and the poem is virtually put together, musically. In the first and second lines of the third stanza, an apostrophe, a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent person or entity, is presented, “We smile, but O great Christ, our cries to thee from tortured souls arise.”

The narrator’s use of the first person is use to create an idea of a bond between the friends, and he uses the term “we” throughout the story to point out that the group was together through it all. In the beginning of the story the narrator tells is that the gang of friends had went two nights without doing anything interesting. Then, the third night “Whatever it was we were looking for, we weren’t going to find it at greasy lake. Not that night.” (295). This short quote shows me that the narrator was trying to tell us that everything that was about to happen from that point on was a group decision. Also, to further elaborate, I found the repetition of the word “we” to be a point of emphasis to try to negate some of the future consequences of his actions to his friends despite

The ways in which the society forces its citizens to refer to themselves as “we” and their similar natured names cause the individuals to view themselves as a group. The first official introduction to the main character is in chapter one when he says, “Our name is Equality 7-2521…”( Rand 18). From the beginning, when Equality says, “Our,” while referring to himself, it is clear that the citizens of the society cannot refer themselves as ‘I’. Excluding personal pronouns, engraves in the people’s minds that they are not individuals. In addition, if citizens were to refer to themselves as ‘I’ they would regard and value themselves as individual people opposed to living for others. As a result, this would defy the basis of collectivist principles. Throughout the story, various characters names are words pertaining to synonyms of brotherhood and togetherness. For instance, while Equality is standing in the great hall watching his brothers while they

Gwendolyn sets the scene with the subtitle of the poem “The pool players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.” Gwendolyn paints this poem through the voice of seven young boys at a pool room during the school day. The first line of the poem is “We real cool. We left school.” Gwendolyn, in other words, is suggesting to readers that the boys are not in school when they are supposed to be and they think they're cool. The poem goes on to state in the next three stanzas that the boys “lurk late,”

This poem has four verses of two stanzas. The final word is ‘we’ in most lines. In the poem, the next line portrays the specific thing that the young people do. For example, the line “we left school.”Except for its subtitle ("THE POOL PLAYERS/SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL"), the poem consists of four stanzas and every stanza is a two-line couplet. Every word in the whole poem has a single syllable. This poem has a relatively new level because the rhyme of couplets is put in the middle place by the author. Therefore, the reader can find “cool/school" in the first stanza, and

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past” (Oscar Wilde). Youthfulness is a quality every person wants to retain. People develop Peter Pan syndrome and want to go to Neverland to stay a child forever. This however, is not possible. Not only because Neverland does not exist, but also because people cannot stay in their youth. They realize their youth is vanishing and people try to hold on to their adolescence. Although on the surface “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, “In just” by E. E. Cummings, and “anyone lived in a pretty how town” also by E. E. Cummings do not seem to have a common theme, youthfulness and progression of life is an underlying theme in each poem.

Furthermore, the last two stanzas are more personal in the sense of how the narrator speaks. The word “we” is used many times in these last two stanzas, more than the first three. In all five of the stanzas, the word “we” was used as the authors way of

The use of irony from Brooks enables the reader to show the theme of unexpected turns of  events. “ We real cool/ we left school/ we lurk late/ we strike straight…”(1-4). These lines show freedom and pride more than anything. Here the pool players are probably living their lives and thinking that nothing in their life before hand was as good as this and that this is the way to live life. Later on in the last section of the poem the kids continue to describe what they are doing with, “ We sing sin/ We thin gin/ We jazz soon/ We die soon” (5-8). Here Irony is greatly shown and is used to prove the theme. The Irony that is here is that the 7 people acted like they finally escaped life and all its rules and boundaries and that finally have

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in