Gwendolyn Brooks published the first iteration of the poem “Boy Breaking Glass” in the June 1967 issue of Negro Digest and later in her 1968 collection In the Mecca with alterations to the stanza breaks. The poem is one of several that mark Brooks’s pivot to more overt denunciation of racism and inequality in the United States of the 1960s. Using a combination of free verse, more regularly metrical lines, and images, Brooks represents a disaffected Black youth struggling for visibility and voice in the inner city. The poem is a snapshot of Brooks as she embraced the Black Arts Movement, during which poets centered the experiences of the Black working-class and a more explicitly political role for Black artists. This guide is based on the poem as it is transcribed on the Poetry Foundation website.

Poet Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. Her working-class family moved to Chicago in the 1910s along with millions of other Black Americans who left small towns and headed to the city for better economic opportunities and equality. Brooks was only 13 when she published her first poem. She studied literature at Wilson Junior College during the 1930s and continued honing her poetic voice through workshops during the 1940s (“Gwendolyn Brooks.” Poetry Foundation).

Brooks published her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. Using loose sonnets, Brooks centers the voices of people enduring poverty and racism in the all-Black Bronzeville district of Chicago. The volume made her a major American poet. In Annie Allen (1949), Brooks plumbed the experiences of Black, working-class women for material, using conventions of epic poetry and more experimental forms. Annie Allen gained Brooks the distinction of being the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Brooks followed up with Maud Martha (1953), a novel that examines the impact of inequality and internalized racism on the protagonist. In The Bean-Eaters (1960), Brooks continues to examine the lives of the working poor.

With the advent of the Black liberation movements of the 1960s, Brooks’s stature diminished among the younger poets, who found her diction and concerns about craft to be overly academic. The reception she received at the 1967 Black Writers Conference at Fisk University, a seminal event that helped solidify the aims of the Black Arts Movement, was chilly, if respectful. In 1968, Brooks published In the Mecca, a collection about the Mecca, a rundown, dangerous tenement in Chicago. The poems of the collection offer a scathing critique of the city of Chicago for its failure to nourish the residents of the Mecca. In 1969, she published Riot, an extended poem on the riots that broke out due to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Brooks’s poems during the 1970s and 1980s sound a more strident note on politics and inequality. That work is also grounded culturally in the African Diaspora—the idea that Black Americans have deep connections to people in Africa and people of African descent outside of Africa. Over the last decades of her life, Brooks accumulated honors and continued to publish. She published her first memoir, Report from Part One (1972), Primer for Blacks (1980), Young Poet’s Primer (1980), To Disembark (1981), The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems (1986), Blacks (1987), Winnie (1988), Children Coming Home (1991), Report from Part Two (1996), and several other works. Brooks was the consultant poet laureate for the Library of Congress in the mid-1980s and received a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts during the 1980s. From 1990 to 2000, Brooks taught English at Chicago State University. She died in 2000 ("Gwendolyn Brooks." Encyclopedia Britannica, 2023).

Poem Text

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Boy Breaking Glass.” 1987. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem includes a dedication to Marc Crawford, a Black editor who prompted Brooks to write the poem.

In Lines 1-6, the speaker, an observer with the trained eye of an artist and critic, describes a glass window that a Black boy broke. In breaking the window, the boy creates the only art available to a child in the inner city. If the broken window is art, it is unfinished; at least it registers the presence of the boy in the world. It makes a sound when it is broken, and that, too, is art. To outsiders, breaking glass looks like vandalism, but the observer finds breaking the glass to be far more than simple destruction. People ask themselves what is wrong with Black children like this, but the truth is that if you take a child, crush every bit of hope in him, give him no avenues for creative self-expression, and ignore him until he destroys your property, this is what you get.

In Lines 7-8, the boy speaks. He tells the reader that the broken window is the only way for him to make his mark on the world.

In Lines 9-10, the observer notes that the boy is the descendant of enslaved people bartered for spices and held in the dark holds of ships. Only a little light ever reached them there. The boy’s knowledge of the contrast between darkness and light is in his bones.

In Lines 11-15, the boy speaks again. He is like his ancestors—lonely and afraid; there are others just like him if he only could see them. When the boy breaks the window, he is striking back at the others who put him in the oppressive world in which he lives. His effort might be futile in the end since most won’t get what he is saying with the broken window. Most won’t know or care when he leaves the world.

Lines 15-17 are the voices of artists and musicians who create sanctioned art. People like that merely retreat to the cozy cup of tea when they feel inarticulate. It is almost as if this boy and those artists live on different planets.

In Lines 18-19, the speaker acknowledges that in reality, the boy and the traditional artist do live in the same world, but they experience it differently.

In Lines 20-21, the boy speaks again. He knows he lives in this same world. He accuses everyone—the observer, the artists, and America, which destroyed his true name by enslaving his ancestors—of theft. No one knows who he is.

In Lines 22-27, the speaker notes that there isn’t a thing or place in the United States that will allow the boy to see himself as part of America, so perhaps the boy’s accusation is truth. The boy runs away from the broken window. What, then, is the boy? The speaker tries to find a way to describe the boy but cannot settle on just the right word because it is unclear if the boy is a menace or the bearer of great potential.