Be Smart When Rebelling

This week in poetry class we talked about Gwendolyn Brooks and about her poem "We Real Cool." In her poem she uses simple language as well as complex poetic devices such as enjambment to illustrate her point. In the poem, she talks about a bunch of black high school graduates in Chicago who basically are looking to fulfill their instant desires and pleasures. They play pool, they drink, they lurk, they don't go to school, and they are promiscuous. Throughout the poem, the attitude is confident coming from the point of view of the dropouts. However at the end of the poem, there is a very forward fulcrum that does not mince words: "We / Die soon."

I think that Gwendolyn Brooks is giving us words of wisdom through this poem. She breaks away from beat poets, and other poets who call for reform and the questioning of social practices by writing this poem. I think that Brooks basically is saying in this poem that dropping out of school is going too far. Beat poets and others have said through their poems that we should not restrict ourselves due to what society expects of us, and you can almost say that these high school dropouts were following their advice. They don't want to go to school, they just want to "be cool," and do their own thing by playing pool rather than following what is expected of them: to go to school. Gwendolyn Brooks is almost mocking them when she entitles her poem about them "We Real Cool" because she's making an example of how they need to understand that school is something you need to go to for the betterment of yourself through learning and knowledge. She is not necessarily against the beat movement, or the questioning of society, however she wants these dropouts and people like them to understand that what they are doing is not the best way to embody the ideas of the poets who have preached about questioning society. At the end of the poem Brooks issues the dropouts a dire warning that if they continue to live a life that follows their pleasures that do not better themselves or society, they will end up dying.

Reading this poem reminds me of something I read in my English class last year, and that has to do with some of the same arguments that Brooks and these dropouts have. This reminds me of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Thoreau was aggressively non-conformist. He preached that a man should "live deliberately" and decide what kind of life he (or she) wants to live. He said in his work "Walden" that everyone should have freedom for American ideals such as capitalism, and that everyone should live authentically by not doing anything a person does not want to do. He says that there ought to be no inherited principles, and a person should only follow what he or she values. He also believes that a person should fight for what they believe in, and that in an ideal world there should be no government, and because there is a government a person should break the law in order to make a statement in favor of what he or she believes in. Thoreau actually built his own cabin and lived in it for 2 years without interacting with society in order to prove that a person can live deliberately. He did not work in that time period, and he basically did what he wanted in order to prove in his book "Walden" that anyone could ignore society and live on their own. While in theory his idea is a good one, it is far from practical.

Walt Whitman, on the other hand, is more in line with Brooks' argument. Whitman writes in his poem "Song of Myself" that a person should be free from constraint. He believes that a person must ignore the hardships of life, and live the good things ourselves. He says that we must live up to our own interpretation of life and not look at it through the eyes of the dead or in the second or third hand. Whitman himself wants to enjoy life for himself as well while he is living. However, Whitman differs from Thoreau in the sense that he says that everyone has something to contribute to society. He talks in his poem about how everyone should be able to contribute something to society through their chosen professions. Whitman is very pro American and believes that everyone in society has something to give, however it should be what they are passionate about, and do what they like. Thoreau argues on the other hand that a person should not have to work, and that he should be able to do whatever he wants, and that a person can live on his own without society or government.

Brooks and Whitman argue that the argument of Thoreau and the high school dropouts are fundamentally flawed because in a perfect world, they would be able to do what they want, however a person cannot just do what they want for the benefit of themselves and not society. Brooks and Whitman want these dropouts to know that they can live a life of self determination, however they need to better themselves in order to be able to better live that live of self determination by doing things like going to school. Only then when they are educated can they make judgments on how to live their life the way they want to live them. Whitman and Brooks argue that once they are bettered through with regard to education in Brooks' poem, that they can live a life that they want to live, however they must be educated enough to make those decisions, so that they can successfully live their own life without dying, as Brooks shows what the end result would be if they did not do this.