Gwendolyn Brooks For the CSET

Are you studying for the CSET English or CSET Multiple Subjects exams? If you are, then you need to know about the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. In this lesson we will look at Gwendolyn Brooks, read a Wikipedia article about her, watch several videos about her life and influence, and close the lesson with several of her poems.

Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an award-winning African American woman poet.

Wikipedia writes: “Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in her schools. She first attended Hyde Park High School, a leading white high school, before transferring to all-black Wendell Phillips. Brooks eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. Her father provided a desk and bookshelves, and her mother took her, when she was in high school, to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.”

Her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen, received a Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first won by an African American. In 1968, she was made Poet Laureate of Illinois. Other awards she received included the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brooks was awarded more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide.

Her poetry is rooted in the poor and mostly African American South Side of Chicago. Her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to blues rhythms in free verse, and her characters are often from the poor inner city. Her bluesy poem We Real Cool is often found in school textbooks. She is seen as a leader of the Black Arts movement.

We Real Cool’s beauty, strength, and power are rooted in its effective use of line breaks and enjambment (running over from one line of poetry to the next without a stop). Brooks’ strategic choice of line breaks affects virtually every aspect of the poem: its pace, rhythm, mood, tone, characters, sound, and meaning.