Gwendolyn Brooks

that deal with that loss. The speaker in Gwendolyn Brooks “the sonnet-ballad” uses literary elements such as metaphor and personification to express her grief and loss of her lover’s identity being lost back at war. In the sonnet, personification is a major aspect because the speaker utilizes it to show and express the loss she has experienced. Brooks begins the poem with “Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? / They took my lover’s tallness off to war” (Brooks 1-2). The speaker personifies…

The topic of suicide is, and always has been, a grim subject to discuss or write about; however, this did not stop Gwendolyn Brooks from writing a poem about suicide titled, “To the Young Who Want to Die.” In this poem, the speaker of this poem seems to be Gwendolyn Brooks but is not specified. This method of writing is useful because of the way the poem is formatted, combined with the words used in the poem, lets the reader see that the speaker is talking directly to them, or to anyone who…

“The Mother” is a poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks that is about the complexity and controversy of abortions. I have previously analyzed through a new critical lens and discovered that its meaning was to show how a woman can still be a mother, even if she does not give birth to her child. Upon closer reading, using the techniques of marxist and psychoanalytic critics, we see the poem evolve in its connotation. A marxist critic could read this work and see a women who 's social standing could…

In the poem “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks the poet expresses her feelings, for example, remorse, sadness, and regrets about aborting her children. This poem is mainly about the remembrance of the innocent children that she aborted and the little things children do that the mother will miss. In the whole poem she explicates that there is not greater pain than losing a child. She opens the poem with “Abortions will not let you forget” (1034). This line gives the tone for the poem by letting the…

Jorge Lopez Perez Poetry Paper English 111 September 20, 2016 “the mother,” by Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry according to Webster is an arrangement of words, especially a rhythmical composition, sometimes rhymed, in a style more imaginative than ordinary speech. This is truly the foundation to poems and the meaning they carry behind them. Poems make you feel the passion and complex understanding of what is trying to be portrayed. When you read poetry you should read with the expectation that the…

Gwendolyn Brooks would spend the majority of her life in Chicago, observing and experiencing life for African-Americans in the city. Many of her works, including “First Fight. Then Fiddle,” revolve around the struggles of blacks as she understood them. Going to a range of schools and meeting a wide variety of people would introduce her to racism and some of its causes, and develop her views on the world. She was motivated by these encounters to use her writing to educate her readers about the…

that explored the African American cultural and historical experience. A Poet in the Black Arts Movement that really stood out to me was Gwendolyn Brooks. By the age of seventeen, Gwendolyn Brooks, had more than one hundred poems in print, and her subject matter was frequently the difficulties of growing up black and impoverished in America. Best known for…

Raymond Johnson Intro into literature Mr. McDonald 11/9/14 We Are Cool Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" was written in 1959, which was in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The poem sums up the reality that many adolescences faced at that time whether they chose to drop out of school. Within this era in American history the case of Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, the Supreme Court legislated that it was unconstitutional to segregate schools based on race; nevertheless,…

dictates how people act and what they do in a certain society. In the poem, the speaker’s voice is the collective group of boys saying “We real cool. We left School. We die soon”. Brooks uses the young boy’s voices as a group to convey the attitude of most young men. Young men are cool and casual, they go with the group. Brooks uses the collective voice of the young boys because the poem is about how the boys do everything together; there is no one decision or one leader of the group. The…

Gwendolyn Brooks poem, We Real Cool, was written in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and racial tensions that existed during the 1960s. During this time period many African Americans were constantly rejected from possessing basic human rights and becoming sufficient members of society. Brooks poem reflects how while facing constant scrutiny and prejudice from their white counterparts, much of the African-American youth struggled to discover their identity, questioning their roles in…