Langston Hughes' Autobiographical Poems

Langston Hughes copes with the reality of race in his works and with the social tensions that make the black man especially one who is outside the social norm while also being required to conform or be destroyed. 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 through his work that is difficult for the average black man to achieve in society. Some of his poems are indeed directly autobiographical, while all of his poems are infused with his experience as a black man in America.

His "Theme for English B" is one of his more autobiographical poems:

There is relatively little distance between him and the experience recounted in the poem. . . The poem reiterates one of Hughes' leading themes, first enunciated at the close of The Watery Blues: that "I, too, am America," American identity of necessity embraces equally the white and the black experience (Black Heritage 105).

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Category: Literature - L