To Be in Love

“To Be in Love” first appeared in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Selected Poems (1963). The poem appears in the collection’s last section, which was dedicated to new work. The other sections were culled from A Street in Bronzeville (1945), the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Annie Allen (1949), and The Bean Eaters (1960). The poems in Selected Poems are considered to be among Brooks’s best. “To Be in Love” is a lyric poem of 32 lines that details the experience of someone who is in love. However, the lover’s physical absence, as well as imbalanced emotional reciprocity, endangers that love, causing heartbreak for the speaker. This poem is typical of Brooks’s other lyric, free verse poems in her mid-career in that it centers on emotional concerns while employing deliberate sound techniques and vivid imagery to capture a sense of realism. Disillusionment is a predominant theme in “To Be in Love,” a subject that appears throughout her oeuvre. Brooks may be better known for her poems that comment on the urban poor and the plight of Black people in the United States, such as the widely anthologized “We Real Cool” (See: Further Reading & Resources).