Life & Wisdom Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

A poet describing her origin story could easily lapse into myth, but Brooks keeps it disarmingly plain: fascination first, then play. The word choice matters. “Very early in life” doesn’t romanticize inspiration as a lightning strike; it frames language as a lifelong craft learned the way you learn anything that lasts - by starting young and staying close to it. “Wonders” tilts the line toward awe, yet it’s an awe rooted in technique. Language doesn’t just feel; it achieves. It does work.

Then comes the turn that reveals Brooks’s real thesis: she “began playing with words.” Play is often treated as the opposite of seriousness, but for Brooks it’s the engine of mastery and the gateway to power. Subtext: the writer’s first apprenticeship isn’t in publishing or prestige, but in permission - permission to experiment, to try on voices, to bend syntax, to make meaning misbehave until it clicks. For a Black woman coming of age in early 20th-century Chicago, “play” also carries a quiet defiance. If the world polices your speech and narrows your options, claiming language as a toy and a tool is a way of reclaiming agency.

Context sharpens the line further. Brooks’s poems are famous for their musical compression and social exactness, for making ordinary lives ring with intelligence and heat. This quote hints that the precision wasn’t accidental; it began as curiosity and became discipline. The “wonders” aren’t abstract. They’re what happens when a sentence can hold a whole neighborhood, and still sing.