A Study Guide (New Edition) for Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool", 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535868013

Book preview

17

We Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks

1959

Introduction

We Real Cool is a short poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. It was first published in Poetry magazine in September 1959 along with a few other poems from her forthcoming collection The Bean Eaters, which was released in 1960. It is Brooks's most famous and most anthologized poem, though she once said, during a 1983 reading at the Guggenheim Museum (audible at Poets.org), I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I'd written a few other poems.

Just twenty-four words long, the poem, as Brooks related at the Guggenheim reading, characterizes a group of seven boys who were hanging out at a pool hall in her neighborhood. With short three-word lines featuring internal rhyme, the poem has a jazzlike rhythm. In colorful, punchy language, it lists the cool things the boys do, until the poem ends abruptly with a prediction of their early death. Brooks writes with precision and economy in We Real Cool, exploring themes of rebellion, identity, and death in just two dozen words. The poem can also be found in Brooks's Selected Poems (1963) and editions of her collected verse.

Author Biography

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, but when she was just a month old her family moved to Chicago. Her father, David Anderson Brooks, worked as a janitor, and her mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, was a former schoolteacher. Her parents encouraged her love of books and writing, and by the age of seven she was already writing poetry. At eleven, Brooks had four of her poems published in a local newspaper, and at thirteen she had another published in the magazine American Childhood.

Brooks met famous poet Langston Hughes at a poetry reading when she was sixteen. Impressed with her work, he offered her