The Poetry of Hughes by Langston Hughes

First published:The Weary Blues, 1926; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927; Dear Lovely Death, 1931; The Negro Mother, 1931; The Dream Keeper, and Other Poems, 1932; Scottsboro Limited, 1932; A New Song, 1938; Shakespeare in Harlem, 1942; Fields of Wonder, 1947; One Way Ticket, 1949; Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951; Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1959; Ask Your Mama: Or, Twelve Moods for Jazz, 1961; The Panther and the Lash: Or, Poems of Our Times, 1967

Type of work: Poetry

A Literary Giant

Langston Hughes was the most versatile, popular, and influential African American writer of the twentieth century. Hughes published scores of books in his lifetime: two novels, plays, collections of short stories and essays, an autobiography, seven children’s books, poetry translations, a number of African American poetry and fiction anthologies, and fourteen volumes of verse. From the 1920’s until his death in May, 1967, Hughes was widely recognized as the unofficial poet laureate of the African American urban experience, its most dedicated and passionately eloquent voice; his international reputation has only grown in the years since.

Hughes’s career as a poet began, rather abruptly, in the spring of 1916. At the age of thirteen, he was elected class poet of his Lincoln, Illinois, grammar school. Even though he had never written a poem, Hughes dutifully produced sixteen poems in praise of his teachers and class, which he read aloud at graduation, to hearty applause. Soon thereafter, Hughes moved to Cleveland, Ohio, with his mother and stepfather. There he attended the city’s Central High School and continued to write poetry, both in the free-verse style of Chicago working-class poet Carl Sandburg and in the dialect style of the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the year after his graduation from high school in 1920, Hughes had his first real publications. A number of poems appeared in succeeding issues of The Brownie’s Book, a junior version of The Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Writing for The Crisis

Almost immediately, Hughes was graduated to the parent journal. The June, 1921, issue of The Crisis published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes’s first great poem. Written a year earlier, on a train crossing the Mississippi, this short lyric (dedicated to NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois) proudly affirms the mystical unity of all persons of African descent, regardless of when or where they happen to live. A poem of praise, rendered in plainspoken free verse, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” shows the clear influence of Carl Sandburg. Another discernible influence is that of Walt Whitman, whom Hughes regarded as the greatest of American poets. Like Whitman’s famous long poem “Song of Myself,” Hughes’s poem features a first-person speaker, an “I” that refers not only to the poet but also to an entire people he identifies with and, in effect, becomes; when the speaker avers that his “soul has grown deep like the rivers,” he assumes the voice of the entire African race throughout history. Finally, in its moving lyricism, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” harks back to the centuries-old tradition of the African American spiritual.

That Hughes, at the age of nineteen, had already established a unique and powerful poetic voice became fully evident over the next year and a half as Jessie Redmon Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis, published another dozen Hughes poems. Among them were poems that were to be Hughes’s most anthologized, such as “The South,” “Beggar Boy,” “My People,” “Mother to Son,” and “Negro.” “Mother to Son” is a dramatic monologue that displays one of Hughes’s signal strengths as a poet: his ability to adopt a convincing persona. The speaker is the mother alluded to in the title, a (presumably) middle-aged black woman who recounts her arduous life of poverty and toil in metaphorical terms as the endless climbing of a staircase. The goal at the top of the stair is a freer, more dignified life, not just for herself and her son but for her entire people. World-weary but stoical and grimly determined, the mother exhorts her son never to forfeit the struggle by turning back.

“Negro” is a free-verse dramatic monologue in much the same vein as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The “I” persona that Hughes adopts is, again, universal in scope: that of the black African throughout recorded history. In successive stanzas, the poem’s speaker recounts the four basic roles he has been relegated to throughout the ages: slave, worker, singer, victim. “Negro” outlines a saga of suffering and sorrow (“The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo/ They still lynch me in Mississippi”), yet it eschews self-pity. The last stanza, which repeats the first stanza verbatim and thus frames the middle four, ends the poem as it began, on a note of proud and joyous affirmation: “I am a Negro/ Black as the night is black/ Black like the depths of my Africa.”

The emphasis on racial pride in “Negro” is typical of Hughes’s early poems, many of which are paeans to the dignity, endurance, and inner strengths of African Americans. Hughes’s early verse is not, however, monotonously uniform in style and theme. The poems published by The Crisis also include protest poems, elegies, miscellaneous lyrics, and formal experiments that were inspired by, and imitative of, jazz and the blues. Indeed, African American folk music became a major source of inspiration for Hughes after he moved to New York City from the Midwest in the fall of 1921 to attend Columbia University.

Harlem and the Renaissance

The move was a watershed event in Hughes’s life, not because of college, which he found uncongenial and quit after his first year, but because it brought him to Harlem, Manhattan’s teeming African American district and the locus for the Harlem Renaissance, a burgeoning cultural revival in which Hughes soon immersed himself. Hughes also explored Harlem’s vibrant nightlife. Early evidence of its impact on his sensibilities is “The Weary Blues,” a 1923 poem about a piano player performing in a Lenox Avenue nightclub. In “a melancholy tone,” the man sings the Weary Blues, a song of thoroughgoing dejection and despair, “far into the night.” Yet, ultimately, the blues seem to have a salutary effect. Once he has completely drained off his own anguish through the music, the singer is able to at least escape his plight by going to bed, to sleep “like a rock or a man that’s dead.” The singer’s struggle to master his pain captures the cathartic essence of the blues—and something of the deeper nature of Harlem in the 1920’s, which was, despite its hectic cabaret life, a place of considerable poverty and hardship.

“The Weary Blues” was a breakthrough for Hughes; it garnered top prize in a literary contest sponsored by the National Urban League in 1925. The award, in turn, won Hughes the support of a prominent literary critic, Carl Van Vechten, who helped Hughes publish his first collection of verse, also entitled The Weary Blues, in 1926. However, the poem stirred controversy among Hughes’s peers in the Harlem Renaissance, some of whom objected to the award on the grounds that “The Weary Blues” was not “literary” enough. Not only did the poem unashamedly draw on folk-music traditions but it also featured a blues pianist who sings in dialect such lines as “I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’/ And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Poetry in the vernacular was deemed politically regressive in some quarters, because it was thought to reinforce white stereotypes regarding African American primitivism. Such criticisms, which were also leveled at The Weary Blues as a whole, show exactly how Hughes’s aesthetic differed from that of the “Talented Tenth,” upper-middle-class black intellectuals who tended to value art that promoted respectability and social advancement through integration. They, therefore, had little use for Hughes’s blunt realism.

Hughes’s second volume of verse, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), proved to be even more controversial than The Weary Blues. The poems in the new book dealt with aspects of everyday life in proletarian Harlem—fundamentalist religion, low-paying jobs, the cabaret, romance, gambling, fights, prostitution, alcohol—and many of them were written in dialect cast in the form of urban folk blues: the ultimate combination of aesthetic sins, according to Hughes’s detractors. Not all critics, however, were disdainful of Hughes’s choice of form, diction, and subject matter. Critic Alain Locke and a few others understood that, while apparently artless, Hughes’s verse was neither simplistic nor vulgar, that the spare effect he achieved was actually crafted with great care and precision, and that Hughes’s portrayal of the joys and calamities of the African American urban masses was executed with honesty and compassion.

After the Crash

The Harlem Renaissance effectively came to an end when the stock market collapsed in October of 1929. The resulting Great Depression, which lasted throughout the 1930’s, had a severe impact on the already marginal economy of Harlem. Like much of the rest of the country, Depression-era Harlem was the scene of mass unemployment, bread lines, evictions, and, occasionally, riots. Under such conditions, many of America’s leading artists and intellectuals embraced Marxism as an alternative political philosophy. Langston Hughes was no exception. The five books of verse that he published in the 1930’s reveal Hughes as an increasingly militant leftist poet. For example, Scottsboro Limited (1932) is a book of four poems and a play in support of the “Scottsboro boys,” nine young African American defendants in an Alabama rape trial, who were widely thought to be falsely accused. A New Song (1938) is Hughes’s only book of verse composed entirely of social-protest poems.

After a decade of world travel, activism, and political poetry, Hughes literally and figuratively returned to Harlem. The result was a collection of verse entitled Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), which is superficially similar to The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew in its exclusive focus on Harlem as subject and its preponderant use of folk-music forms. Depression-ravaged Harlem in the early 1940’s was a vastly different place than it had been in the 1920’s, however. The colorful exuberance of the Harlem Renaissance had long since given way to bitterness and despair, and Hughes’s new book reflected the changed mood in the street. Despite some moments of levity, Shakespeare in Harlem was an almost unremittingly bleak portrait of an urban ghetto in steep decline, as a sampling of poem titles suggests: “Cabaret Girl Dies on Welfare Island,” “Death Chant,” “Ballad of the Pawnbroker,” “Down and Out,” “Midnight Chippie’s Lament,” “Evil Morning.”

One Way Ticket (1949) and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) are Hughes’s verse sketches of Harlem after World War II. Despite the economic boom of the postwar years, Harlem was still grappling with grinding poverty and its attendant social ills and was perennially frustrated at the lack of improvement. “Harlem,” a short lyric from Montage of a Dream Deferred, is justly revered as Hughes’s most powerful poem of social protest. In a series of rhetorical questions, the poem’s speaker asks what happens when the African American dream of equality of opportunity is endlessly deferred by white society. He conjectures that the dream might “dry up” or “fester” or sag “like a heavy load.” Not quite satisfied with these answers, the speaker then asks, “Or does it explode?” The question is a veiled warning that the ghetto may one day erupt in violence. In its brevity, vivid clarity of effect, and moral seriousness, “Harlem” epitomizes Hughes’s poetry, which combined consummate artistry with an unflagging social conscience—a relatively rare combination in American literature.

Bibliography

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983. Sets out to re-create the historical context in which Hughes lived and worked. Quotes an unusual number of poems in their entirety and includes extensive discussions of Hughes’s poetry throughout the biography.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New ed. New York: Blooms Literary Criticism, 2008. A collection of some of the best criticism of Hughes’s works, with several articles on his poetry. Supplemented by a useful bibliography and an index.

Emanuel, James A. Langston Hughes. Boston: Twayne, 1967. A concise overview of Hughes’s extraordinary career. Contains a chronology, an annotated bibliography, and notes.

Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Divides Hughes’s imagination into the “autobiographical,” the “apocalyptic,” the “lyrical,” the “political,” and the “tragicomic.” Each chapter focuses on a poem or other work central to an appreciation and understanding of Hughes’s imagination.

Mullen, Edward J., ed. Critical Essays on Langston Hughes. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Useful for its generous selection of contemporary reviews of the poet’s work. An extensive and well-documented introduction surveys and analyzes the critical reception of Hughes’s poetry.

Onwuchekwa, Jemie. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Treats Hughes’s poetry in thematic terms, with separate chapters on his “black aesthetic,” the blues, jazz and other musical forms, his social protest verse, his evocation of the ideal (“the dream”), and the poet’s place in the “evolution of consciousness in black poetry.” Bibliography and index.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Provides acute interpretations of both Hughes’s character and career. Distinguished by its fine style and balance, this volume is the definitive biography of the poet.