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Born on 1st February 1902 in Joplin Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a young child when his parents parted ways and took divorce. Up to the age of 13 years, he was brought up by his grandmother who was a well-known African community worker in Lawrence. Hughes’s grandfather was a well-known politician in Kansas during the period of Reconstruction. While Hughes was living with his grandmother she was not very rich and suffered from old age problems. He was also much disappointed with his parents for not allowing him to stay with either of them. Such feelings of denial made him become much insecure because of which he developed an immense lack of confidence.
After the death of his grandmother, Hughes’ mother asked him to come and stay with her in Lincoln, Illinois. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing and after having written some commendable poems he was nominated the class poet while in the eighth grade. However he was able to live in Lincoln for only a year since his mother shifted with his stepfather to Cleveland in Ohio and then on to Chicago. However Hughes decided to stay back in Cleveland in order to complete studies at high school. His talent in writing surfaced here and his teachers and class recognized his talent. His first work in poetry was published in his school magazine and in a short span of time he was taken in as a staff member of the magazine in which he regularly contributed his poems. During this time he came in contact with contemporary poets such as Whitman and Sandburg after being introduced to them by his teachers. It was these opportunities and experiences that became the initial influences on his life. He wrote his first jazz poetry titled When Sue Wears Red during this time and it was here that his love for books started developing. After his junior school in high school was over, his father James Hughes came back into his life. Hughes’s father had expressed his desire to him that he must live in Mexico with him. He lived in Mexico during the following summer but was unable to get by well with his father, and this painful conflict was actually responsible for making him a more mature person. After he came back to Cleveland in order to complete high school, the quality of his writing skills had improved considerably and by the time he finished his senior year at high school, he had begun writing poetry with distinction. It was this stage of Hughes’s life that formed the foundation and basis for what he achieved in life subsequently (Santis, 1995).
After having graduated from high school Hughes had wanted to go to Mexico to meet his father so as to influence him into paying his university fees for pursuing education at Columbia University in New York. Hughes believed that at Columbia University he could continue with his college studies while at the same time make his livelihood as a writer. While he traveled to Mexico by train he deeply thought about his life and his circumstances and ended up penning down his very well-known poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Hughes was initially unable to reconcile with his father in Mexico and there was rising tension between the two. Hughes had the earnest desire to make a career as a writer while his father wanted that in keeping with the trends prevailing during the time, he should become an engineer. However, his father was much impressed with Hughes after some of his poems were selected for publication by Crisis and Brown Book magazines, and he gave him the required one year’s expenses to pursue his education at Columbia University.
Hughes commenced his education at Columbia University in 1921 after a gap of about a year of leaving high school. After having stayed in school for about a year Hughes became an important part of the art scenario in Harlem to such an extent that he symbolized in several ways the character of the period from the literary perspective. Much of the vital first-person account of the period and its main players are given in the first volume of his autobiography titled The Big Sea. Most of what is known to the world about the Harlem Renaissance is through the point of view expressed by Langston Hughes. He had also begun to publish his literary works including poems in the Opportunity and Crisis magazines on a regular basis. Hughes was able to establish contact and an excellent rapport with contemporary writers such as Weldon Johnson, DuBois, Claude McCay and Countee Cullen. The literary career of Hughes had effectually commenced in 1925 after his poem The Weary Blues was honored with the first prize in the literary contests initiated by the Opportunity magazine. The first part of his poems which was also given the title of The Weary Blues, was introduced in 1926.
Langston Hughes has made very meaningful and effective use in his works of the African American music rhythms comprising mainly of jazz and blues. This way his poetry is given a different identity as compared to other writers and it also permitted him to make experiments with rhythmic free verses. Fine Clothes to the Jew which was written by Hughes in 1927 was not very well received when published since it was in the nature of being experimental, although now it is believed by critics to be one of his best works (Lexington, 1989). Hughes joined high school again in 1926 although this time he opted to enroll himself in Pennsylvania at the famous Lincoln University where black students were enrolled in majority. Here he enjoyed the patronage of a wealthy white lady named Charlotte Osgood Mason who supported him in his literary efforts and encouraged him to write the novel Not Without Laughter, but the two fell out in 1930 after they could not resolve disputes with each other. It was during this time that Hughes developed interest in socialism and began to interact with leftist political parties. During the later 1930s his writings were focused on theatre and his drama on miscegenation ran for the longest period on Broadway amongst plays written by African Americans (Broomall, 1999).
While the second World War was at its peak, Hughes embarked upon writing a feature for the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper and in 1943 he presented the character of Jesse Semple to his audience. This character was full of humor and permitted Hughes to take up the discussion of racial issues. The columns became very popular and regularly ran for twenty years to be ultimately compiled in a number of books. Hughes was known to have been financially tight throughout his life. He was able to support himself by writing and managed to buy a house in Harlem from the proceeds of his Broadway musical Street Scene. In 1951 he wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred and thereafter wrote over twenty added works. A few years before his death, Langston Hughes had become well reputed for being the Poet Laureate of the Negro Race since he aimed at representing his race and writing for their cause in his writings, and was believed to be the most forthright amongst poets of African American origin. Langston Hughes died on 22nd May 1967 after having had a failed abdominal surgery arising from prostate cancer (Faith, 1995).
Hughes dreamt that people in a nation should not be measured by the color of their skin but by the basis that forms their character and achievement in life. Langston Hughes gave lot of importance to dreams and deeply contemplated their significance which found their way in his poems titled As I Grew Older, Dreams and Dream Deferred. All three poems throw light on the inequality prevailing in America and address the issue of all kinds of oppression. By using metaphorical language Hughes has been able to convince people that if they are unable to fulfill their dreams they often do not achieve their full potential. The three poems provide the reader with the consequences arising from dreams that remain unfulfilled. While reflecting on his moving words one can easily infer that if a person’s worth and potential are not recognized, it becomes a loss to the entire world. A lot of graphic similes have been used by Hughes in Dream Deferred while relating the loss of dreams with a raisin in the sun. He also writes about the effect that a person has if he fails to realize his true potential which is like an incurable sore that smells like bad meat. On the other hand he asserts that if dreams are deferred they may crystallize just as happens over time on a syrupy sweet, in explaining the submissive behavior of some black people in view of their weak position in society. Dream Deferred is a reflection by Hughes on the oppression faced by his race, which is evident from, “yes, ma’am, yes sir…maybe (deferred dreams) just sag like a heavy load,” (Hughes, 1990). In this poem Hughes asks the reader “or does it explode,” (Hughes, 1990), thereby indicating that the rejoinder to such injustice will result in detonation of violence and anger.
His other poem Dreams reflects on the losses observed in Dream Deferred. In this poem he makes use of the haunted metaphor in regard to a bird with a broken wing that is unable to fly, thus illustrating that every life is empty without dreams. In his poems Hughes implies that dreams provide wings and thus momentum which enables one to fly and hence make life worth living. Hughes wanted that people should realize the hurt resulting from the inability to realize one’s dreams. In another metaphor he writes about life being a “…barren field/ frozen with snow; here, in this barren field, the broken bird — dreams — goes to die,” (Hughes, 1990). By portraying such a visual approach Hughes invokes a burial taking place in the snow. This kind of loss can be applicable to any person but more in context with the African Americans as reflected in his poems.
In his poem As I Grew Older, Hughes explicitly conveys that the loss of dreams connotes the existence of a shadow that suffocates and a wall that does not allow one to move ahead. Hughes writes that when he was a child he had dreams, “…in front of me-/ bright like a sun,” (Hughes, 1990). But this wall became a barrier to his dreams. It was so high that it “rose until it touched the sky,” (Hughes, 1990). In essence, the wall has been used as a metaphor in connoting circumstances that create obstructions in life. It implies the existence of suffocation because of the wall which makes a person see only its shadow and nothing else. However unlike the other two poems, in As I Grew Older, Hughes sketches a much better outcome. While in Dreams Deferred the deprivation of dreams may bring about a possible explosion and in Dreams, “life is a broken-winged bird,” Hughes (1990) writes on a more positive note in As I Grew Older about desiring to “break through the wall,” as also in asking for assistance so as “to shatter this darkness,” (Hughes, 1990). In being able to shatter such inhibitions irrespective of whether they arise due to religion, age, race or sex or whether they are inflicted by self or others, Hughes says that one can “…break this shadow/into a thousand lights of sun/into a thousand whirling dreams/of sun,” (Hughes, 1990).
References
- Faith Berry, Before & Beyond Harlem: Biography of Langston Hughes, 1995, Random House Value Publishing
- Broomall P A, Langston Hughes: comprehensive research and study guide, 1999, Chelsea House Publishers
- Hughes Langston, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1990, Vintage Books
- Lexington K Y, The Art and Language of Langston Hughes, 1989, University Press of Kentucky
- Santis Christopher C. De, Hughes Langston, Langston Hughes and the “Chicago Defender”, 1995, University of Illinois Press
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