Poetry and the Civil Rights Movement

Poetry is created through the use of various rhetorical devices that have no inherent meaning within themselves, but when used within a poem, create meaning through the feelings and emotions which they convey to the reader. Thus, an examination of a couple of these rhetorical devices within two well-known poems will offer insight into that which stirs these particular emotions within the audience. This paper will look at two poems commonly used as insight into the civil rights movement: Gwendolyn Brooks' "We real cool", and Langston Hughes' "Negro," and explore how these rhetorical devices specifically dialect and first person narration create the feelings that they have within the African American community, and within the American community as a whole.

Langston Hughes' "Negro" is written in first person narration, automatically implying to the audience the air of personal experience. This is important to Hughes' as a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, because the movement was made up entirely of first person accounts of experiences and feelings. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that an individual's personal

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Category: Literature - P