We Real Cool is a poem with a very powerful message behind it. Poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, illustrates the essence of seven reckless teenage dropouts playing pool at a pool bar, celebrating the bad things they do but realizing they could get killed. This poem was published in 1960 and during that time, many movements were in place such as the civil rights movement, women's rights movements, and black arts movement. The black arts movement had a major impact in theater and poetry, which helped influence Gwendolyn Brooks on writing the poem, We Real Cool.
In her poem, "We Real Cool", Gwendolyn Brooks uses rhythm, rhyme and enjambment to evoke emotion and create meaning within the poem. She uses the same number of syllables in each line besides the first and the last. Brooks breaks up each line before a complete thought is finished: "We Real Cool, We / left school. We." This is called enjambment, the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line. After each "We" comes a verb and a noun, and this describes what "really cool" actually means. There are many definitions and alliterations used within this poem, and one can imagine the pool players explaining what it means to be cool while smoking and nonchalantly hitting the balls into the pockets. In other words, they're not only showing us what it
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One of those literary devices are metaphors. Brooks used a series of metaphors which are used to emphasize the way the seven pool players, the "we" who addresses the reader, as being "cool". Furthermore, the metaphors are strengthened by alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of a word. An example of this would be, "We / Sing sin", this indicates that these teens are being part of a wicked or reprehensible act. "We / Jazz June" is another implied metaphor, and this creates an image that they're "freedom dancing", or enjoying doing immoral