31 pages • 1 hour read
We Real Cool
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Overview
Gwendolyn Brooks stands among the foremost American poets of the 20th century. A master of poetic form and portraiture, she explored black life in Chicago, where she lived for the majority of her life. The poem “We Real Cool,” Brooks’s most famous work, appeared in her 1960 collection The Bean Eaters.
As a fledgling writer, Brooks combined early influences from the literary era of modernism, defined by poets like Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, with her mastery of traditional forms like the sonnet. Brooks’s style and content transformed when the poet came under the influence of the Black Arts movement in Chicago, which included poets Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Lorraine Hansberry, and Brooks’s friend, the writer Haki R. Madhubuti. An offshoot of the Black Power movement, the Black Arts movement encouraged black artists to celebrate and advocate for their racial identity, which Brooks increasingly did in verse and in life.
“We Real Cool” became Brooks’s magnum opus; it was a favorite among English classrooms and at the poet’s public readings. The poem, inspired by a group of young men Brooks once saw at a pool hall in her Chicago neighborhood, memorializes itself in readers’ minds for its snappy Unlock all 31 pages of this Study Guide Plus, gain access to 8,850+ more expert-written Study Guides. Including features:
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
