Literary Analysis Of Gwendolyn Brooks's 'We Real Cool'

Poetry has been around for thousands of years throughout human history and has been used as a tool for telling stories from one generation to another. These short passages can describe love, cleverness, hate or war; one can find beauty in them and interpret them in their own personal way. Poetry as the Miriam Webster dictionary describes it “is writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm”. The poem We Real Cool written by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks gives us this visionary image of a group that share their lifestyle experiences. Ms. Brooks used a variety of rhetorical devices such as assonance, alliteration, anaphora as well as metaphors and archetypes as figures of speech to invoke emotions in the reader.

Ms. Brooks precisely placed “We” after every single period, for example (We real cool. We), starting from the beginning of the poem except for the very last line. While reading the poem the reader cannot help but notice how strongly Ms. Brooks emphasized using the word ‘we”. That momentary stop after each period also influences the reader to stress the vowel sound “e” repeatedly in an isolated way; this is an example of a figure of speech called assonance. In line one of the poem “We real cool. We” as well as in line two of the poem “Left school. We”, the poet uses the words “cool” and “school” which is also another example of the rhetorical device called assonance. It’s almost as if one is rhyming when reading this poetic piece; this is not a vague poem. Ms. Brooks used the word “we” in a very calculated and artistic