We Real Cool By Gwendolyn Brooks Analysis

Consequences of Ignorance and Isolation Tenacious foolishness often provides tremendous detriment to the subject. In William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” the foolish are lamented for their ignorant ways that ultimately cost them dearly. While the bases for their actions lie within the contexts of these poems, the mainspring, upon which the behaviors depicted in these poems are built, is a compulsion to isolate. Ignorance may be bliss, but it often comes with consequences. The rebellious youths of “We Real Cool” dropped out of school, drank hard liquor, walked the streets late at night, and got into fights; the poem alludes that this reckless behavior eventually leads to premature death (551,552). In “The World Is Too Much with Us,” it is the modern society who is foolish. The
The young troublemakers were inspired by some adolescent boys that Brooks saw playing pool in a hall. She deliberated on what they might have thought of themselves, wondering if they considered themselves to be against “the establishment,” which Brooks reflected that she must have appeared representative of (Reese). It is fair and easy to assume that the boys of Gwendolyn’s story had similar motivations – to openly disregard authority in all of its forms. For the overly worldly populace in Wordsworth’s sonnet, fishing out a purpose behind their foolishness is not as simple. Their obsessive behaviors are not deliberate but simply the result of living in a manufactured environment full of things and stuff that are often just used to fill an internal untouchable emptiness (Guild). Because this emptiness cannot be satiated but is soothed with purchased goods, the fools continue to seek their happiness in material, forgetting the magnificent earth around