Poetry of Langston Hughes
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Langston Hughes copes with the reality of race in his works and with the social tensions beset the black community. The poetry of Langston Hughes is challenging. It derives from a different tradition from most American poetry, a tradition of black culture, of jazz, and of protest. Hughes celebrated his racial identity, something few poets had done before. He was said to speak for the black masses, and he took this responsibility much to heart. Hughes' poetry seems to come from somewhere deep inside and to explode as a spontaneous utterance, however carefully designed it may actually be. For the black man, society demands a certain level of behavior, denying individuality, while at the same time denying full membership in the society imposing these rules. Hughes feels the force of this paradox in his life and expresses this idea in his poetry, asserting an individual vision through his work that is difficult for the average black man to achieve in society. He accomplishes this by making use of the black experience in America and by drawing upon black idioms, language, music, and cultural elements to evoke a vision of the black man in American life. Hughes came from the black world of the 1920s, a time when black culture was becoming more appealing to white society through the jazz and other music blacks produced. Hughes' poetry was part of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, the name given this explosion in black culture across a wide front, beginning in Harlem and mo
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she emphasizes that her way has not been easy:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it (2-3).
She has persisted in spite of the difficulties, however--"I'se been a-climbin' on" (9)--and this is the lesson she offers her child--"So boy, don't you turn back" (14). In his search for the truth, Hughes does not turn back, and he knows that there is within every black man a truth to be expressed and that is every bit as important as what is expressed by a white person. His poetry is infused with a sense of history and links between generations to show how the black man has survived:
The poem tells the proud story of the race, from earliest times to the present, identifying the Negro as important in the history of civilization. The Negro, like the majestic rivers, has a deep and significant place in world culture; and the poem is a hymn to the beauty and endurance of the race (Dickinson 321).
in "Afro-American Fragment," Hughes again refers to an Africa he only knows from a books rather than direct experience:
So long,
So far away
Is Africa (1-3).
He only knows the Africa "that history books create" (5). The poem is filled with a sense of yearning as the poet clearly longs for the Africa he never knew
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1500
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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