We Real Cool Gwendolyn Brooks Analysis

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The poem, We Real Cool, by Gwendolyn Brooks speaks through the voice of a young clique who believes it is “real cool.” Using slang and simple language to depict the teenage voice in first person, Brooks’s narrators explain that they left school to stay out together late at night, hanging around pool halls, drinking, causing trouble, and meeting girls. Their lifestyle, though, will ultimately lead them to die at a young age. But, despite an early death, the narrator expresses that they are “real cool” because of this risky routine. Through her poem, Brooks’s shows the ironic consequence of acting “cool”: it leads to death.
Brooks’s diction in We Real Cool allows her to make a short and simple poem extremely complex. She writes only twenty-four words, and eight of them are the same: “we.” Her three-word sentences that all contain one-syllable words speak the voice of a young person who is probably not very educated. Instead of saying “we are really cool” or “we will die soon,” Brooks’s uses the slang version of these sentences to emphasize the youth of the narrator. In the poem, she al...

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