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Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool

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Many youths are recognized for being up to no good and showing a sense of immaturity, due to their young age; they have a higher chance of getting into tough situations just to be noticed. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”, she describes what she believes seven young pool players perceive to be cool by using their perspective as the speaker of the poem. Popularity and peer-pressure play a huge role in youths immature actions. Brooks appears to mock the seven young men and deduce that they are in fact not cool. Instead, the message left is that the young men are defiant, uneducated, and careless. Normally youths do not follow every rule, guideline, or instruction given to them; however, the pool players in the poem “We Real Cool” …show more content…

Gwendolyn Brooks uses a unique way to demonstrate the pool players lack of schooling. Throughout the poem, she uses slang and ends almost every line with the pronoun, “we” which would not be seen grammatically correct in the eye of an English professional. She illustrates the image that the young men dropped out through the phrase “we left school” (line1 and 2). Dropouts are not capable of earning the same respect that others who do finish school and get their education receive. “The image of individuals at a pool hall engaging in speech and actions [are] stereotypical [behavior] of individuals with a low educational level” (Bloom). …show more content…

Abandoning the opportunity that getting an education had to offer plays a huge factor on their idea of being “cool” but the actual indication is not so. Youths seek attention and prioritize their time on the certainty of being noticed causing a lack of apprehensiveness about the outcomes of their actions. Along with the subtitle, Brooks uses the phrase “we die soon” to signify early death in the pool players due to their poor decisions. (line 8) However, as the poem is through the young men’s perspective the phrase may also be interpreted to be the reason they are not apprehensive of their engagements. As they “sing sin” (line 4 and 5), they show an enormous “level of comfort with the sin because they are singing it to the world” with no fear of judgement. (Bloom) The pool players have a desirable character but handle it so nonchalantly. They believe that “there is little hope for the future, so they don't need school, they stay out late, they fight, they drink, and engage in sexual mischievous behavior It does not matter because they will be dead soon” perhaps to

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