We Real Cool (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“We Real Cool,” one of Gwendolyn Brooks’s best-known poems, was written in the late 1950s and was included in her fifth book, The Bean Eaters (1960). In 1972, Houston Baker called the attitude of “We Real Cool” “sympathetic irony.” In Brooks’s autobiography, Report from Part One, the poet remarked that the pool players “have no pretensions to any glamor. They are supposedly dropouts, or at least they’re in the poolroom when they should be possibly in school..... These are people who are essentially saying, ‘Kilroy is here. We are. ’ But they’re a little uncertain of the strength of their identity. The ‘We’ — you’re supposed to stop after the ‘We’ and think about validity; of course, there’s no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don’t bother to question every day, of course.” In 1976, Barbara B. Sims wrote that the lines of “We Real Cool” are short to suggest the shortness of the lives of the pool players, and that the words “lurk,” “strike,” and “sin” suggest pool players who, outside the pool hall, thieve, rape, and kill. In a 1979 analysis of the work, Hortense Spillers stressed that, down to the very last line, it is the pool players who speak, implying that the poet does not actively intervene with commentary, especially in the last line. In Gwendolyn Brooks, the first critical volume on the poet’s work, Harry B. Shaw commented, not on the shortness of lines but on the monosyllables of dialogue, which indicate to him that the youths suffer from “aborted mental growth,” and are, in fact, “pitiable” and not cool at all. In an article in The Explicator, Gary Smith asserted that Brooks is ambivalent about the players: “To be sure, she dramatizes the tragic pathos in their lives, but she also stresses their existential freedom .....” The most extensive reading of the poem appears to by D. H. Melhem in his Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. After detailed formal analysis, Melhem, like Smith, also remarked on the poet’s ambivalence, but an ambivalence of a different sort: “.... this is a maternal poem, gently scolding yet deeply sorrowing for the hopelessness of the boys.”