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A highly prolific and versatile artist, Hughes was widely regarded as the poet of his people. He took the world for his audience but the lives of ordinary black people for his principal subject. Langston Hughes was fiercely proud of his black heritage–and utterly convinced that African Americans as African Americans, not honorary whites, would find a place of dignity in American society.
He loved jazz, he loved ragtime, he loved blues, he loved the call and response rhythms of the black church, he loved all things particular to how black Americans had sustained themselves during their time in the United States. The music of his poetry was the sound of Lenox Avenue, Seventh Street, and South State Street; and his language has been appropriately called Harlemese: vibrant, rhythmic, direct, and racy.
I read all of the poems and found Hughes to be passionate and wise. No disrespect when getting his point across. I was not confused nor did I need to look at a dictionary to decipher or understand the point or theme of the poems. I liked the frankness without the rudeness of Hughes’ work. I really had nothing to dislike about Hughes’ work or his messages stated within each poem. Hughes is a thoughtful and passionate writer.
In “The Weary Blues” Hughes introduced to jazz and blues into poetry and, in its sympathetic portraits of street people and the working class, reveal an exquisite sense of the ironic and melodramatic nature of the black American experience. (Hughes 33)
In the poem “My People” Hughes tells us how the Negro feels and what he wants. The theme of this poem is pride: pride in color, pride in African heritage, and pride, as he puts it, in my people. (Hughes 33)
In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Hughes eloquently expressed deep admiration for the race, rich in expression and moving in its message. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Hughes emphasized the dignity and sensitivity of the Negro, a theme he was to use throughout his career. This poem reminds us that for all its unpleasantness there is no shame in being a Negro in America. On the other hand, there is every reason for pride in the dignity and laughter of the Negro people. (Hughes 4)
In “Harlem” also known as “A Dream Deferred” the dominant image or idea became the dream deferred. Isolated vignettes of Harlem life, discrete and sometimes clashing fragments of the culture were unified thematically by the notion of the dream denied; and unified technically, in Hughes’s art, by a centripetal appeal to the rhythms of the new, “be-bop” jazz. The poem asks but answers in the form of other questions. Here the technique is posing rhetorical riddles. The final implication of Harlem’s physical and spiritual geography as the site of the dream deferred is revealed with a new formulation about rivers.
“Theme for English B,” is one of the principal achievements by Hughes that concern an essay offered by a student to his instructor in fulfillment of the assignment to write: “a page tonight / And let that page come out of you—.” (Hughes 247). The truth is that issues from this young, black CCNY student are the voice of Harlem. But the youth takes the opportunity to remind the white teacher that he, too, sings America: “As I learn from you, / I guess you learn from me— / although you’re older—and white— / and somewhat more free” (Hughes 247)
In the poem “Mother to Son” Langston Hughes illustrates the hypothesis that the black mother teaches by being an example to her child. The “mother teaches by example and by word” (Hughes 187) and that the poem shows “work-worn women” who evoke images of life’s hardships yet strive despite the obstacles and continue to climb. The lines “And sometimes goin’ in the dark / Where there ain’t been no light” (Hughes 187) are an example of “spiritual and physical endurance.”The refrain, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” (Hughes 187) reflects the theme of “pain and perseverance” and the ability to cope. (Hughes 187)
In “I, Too” Hughes argues that union activity is not a contradiction to claims of American patriotism. Using the most obvious American icon, the flag, Hughes undermines the belief that radical politics is anti-American. Hughes’s use of “I” in the poem “I, too” illustrates again and again that he is also an American and will never be decent by society and nor will other African Americans. In the poem “I, Too” Hughes gives a picture of African Americans in the past and their capability and power to move ahead in the future. By “I am the darker brother” Hughes means that color makes no difference and everyone is the same under the American Flag, thus we all are like brothers and sisters and we’ll make America what it is. (Hughes 275)
In “Same in Blues,” Hughes has articulated the gender discussion in the Black community that focuses on the disappointment, a man feels when unable to perform the male-ascribed job of provider due to the racial as well as economic conditions. (Hughes 270)
Thus the poems of Langston Hughes focus on the everyday life of ordinary churchgoing black folk. The allegiance of Hughes is more to a rendering of representative than marginal or allegorical types. Whether in the big city or a small town, his characters are less idealized, his settings are less exotic, and his plots less melodramatic. Hughes’s poems strive for the truth of a particular environment and the social rituals of common folk rather than for the truth of the world at large and the lifestyle of street people and migrants. Although each truth has some validity, neither in isolation tells the whole truth of the myriad faces of the black experience in America during the 1920s and 1930s.
Work Cited
Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems: Langston Hughes (Vintage V-910). New York: Vintage Books; 1st edition, 1974.
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