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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
We learn a lot about the pool players of “We Real Cool,” as Brooks’s spare but precisely chosen words leave a remarkably clear impression. Rebellious and carefree, the pool players bristle with youthful bravado in their collective chant. Skipping school to go to the pool hall, the young men have escaped the confines of the mundane for the sake of fun. In a chorus, they proclaim that they hang out on their own as long as they can, joking around, competing at pool, and causing mischief.
The phrase “Strike straight” (Line 6) seems, at first, to refer to the boys’ skills with a pool cue. However, Brooks might also include this powerful verb, strike, to indicate aggressive behavior, either within the group or with others. A quintessential phrase about youthful rebellion is “Sing sin” (Line 7). Like many teenagers, the boys indulge in whatever vices they can when removed from teachers, administrators, and parents: drinking gin (which they water down) and listening to jazz.
The title of the poem, and the line to which it refers, clinches the boys’ elevated sense of self: “We real cool,” (Line 3), they brag, invoking the teenage anthem of expanding boundaries and the limits of freedom.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
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Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
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Maud Martha
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my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The birth in a narrow room
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The Blackstone Rangers
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The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
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The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
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the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
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