LANGSTON HUGHES
Langston Hughes 1902-1967 , Joplin , MO , United States
Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching."
Despite Heyward's statement, much of Hughes's early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented: "Fine Clothes to the Jew was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as 'the poet low-rate of Harlem.' Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. . . . The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot."
An example of the type of criticism of which Hughes was writing is Estace Gay's comments on Fine Clothes to the Jew. "It does not matter to me whether every poem in the book is true to life," Gay wrote. "Why should it be paraded before the American public by a Negro author as being typical or representative of the Negro? Bad enough to have white authors holding up our imperfections to public gaze. Our aim ought to be [to] present to the general public, already misinformed both by well meaning and malicious writers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves." Commenting on reviewers like Gay, Hughes wrote: "I sympathized deeply with those critics and those intellectuals, and I saw clearly the need for some of the kinds of books they wanted. But I did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, I personally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good. Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability to work up to a master's degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too."
Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people—not because it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet's reaction to his father's flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervour." (Langston Hughes's parents separated shortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other American blacks.) In Hughes's own words, his poetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the instalment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."
In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hughes was "critically, the most abused poet in America. . . . Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes' poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes' tragedy was double-edged: he was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was demode, and he didn't go much beyond one of his earliest themes, black is beautiful. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll."
Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations. Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for Black World noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that 'we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,' and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people. He used his poetry and prose to illustrate that 'there is no lack within the Negro people of beauty, strength and power,' and he chose to do so on their own level, on their own terms."
Hughes brought a varied and colourful background to his writing. Before he was twelve years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes: "On the whole, Hughes' creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso's, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if 'different views engage' us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it's over. . . . Hughes' [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do."
Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks," Simple once commented, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life." Simple's musings first appeared in 1942 in "From Here to Yonder," a column Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post. According to a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, their original intent was "to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort." They were later published in several volumes.
A more recent collection, 1994's The Return of Simple, contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a Publishers Weekly critic who noted Simple's addressing of such issues as political correctness, children's rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes that the "charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. . . . Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won't allow him to brood over a failure very long. . . . Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun. This does not mean that Simple is in any way dull. He injects the ordinary with his own special insights. . . . Simple is a natural, unsophisticated man who never abandons his hope in tomorrow." A reviewer for Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: "The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives. It was not that ideas and events and places and people beyond the limits of Harlem—all of the Harlems—did not concern him; these things, indeed, were a part of his consciousness; but Simple's rock-solid common-sense enabled him to deal with them with balance and intelligence. . . . Simple knows who he is and what he is, and he knows that the status of expatriate offers no solution, no balm. The struggle is here, and it can only be won here, and no constructive end is served through fantasies and illusions and false efforts at disguising a basic sense of inadequacy. Simple also knows that the strength, the tenacity, the commitment which are necessary to win the struggle also exist within the Black community." Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key to Langston Hughes . . . was the poet's deceptive and profound simplicity. Profound because it was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colours and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God."
It was Hughes' belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that "most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been." Reviewing The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times in Poetry, Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes's "sensibility [had] kept pace with the times," but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance. "Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race," Lieberman commented. "A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes' politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically."
Despite some recent criticism, Hughes's position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. . . . His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson's or Robinson Jeffers'. . . . By moulding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."
The Block and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book are posthumously published collections of Hughes's poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes's poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bears the book's title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, "reflect Hughes's childlike wonder as well as his sense of humour." Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes's words, noting that "children love a good rhyme" and that Hughes gave them "just a simple but seductive taste of the blues." Hughes's poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music.
Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that Hughes "has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet."
Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching."
Despite Heyward's statement, much of Hughes's early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented: "Fine Clothes to the Jew was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as 'the poet low-rate of Harlem.' Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. . . . The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot."
An example of the type of criticism of which Hughes was writing is Estace Gay's comments on Fine Clothes to the Jew. "It does not matter to me whether every poem in the book is true to life," Gay wrote. "Why should it be paraded before the American public by a Negro author as being typical or representative of the Negro? Bad enough to have white authors holding up our imperfections to public gaze. Our aim ought to be [to] present to the general public, already misinformed both by well meaning and malicious writers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves." Commenting on reviewers like Gay, Hughes wrote: "I sympathized deeply with those critics and those intellectuals, and I saw clearly the need for some of the kinds of books they wanted. But I did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, I personally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good. Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability to work up to a master's degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too."
Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people—not because it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet's reaction to his father's flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervour." (Langston Hughes's parents separated shortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other American blacks.) In Hughes's own words, his poetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the instalment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."
In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hughes was "critically, the most abused poet in America. . . . Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes' poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes' tragedy was double-edged: he was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was demode, and he didn't go much beyond one of his earliest themes, black is beautiful. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll."
Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations. Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for Black World noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that 'we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,' and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people. He used his poetry and prose to illustrate that 'there is no lack within the Negro people of beauty, strength and power,' and he chose to do so on their own level, on their own terms."
Hughes brought a varied and colourful background to his writing. Before he was twelve years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes: "On the whole, Hughes' creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso's, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if 'different views engage' us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it's over. . . . Hughes' [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do."
Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks," Simple once commented, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life." Simple's musings first appeared in 1942 in "From Here to Yonder," a column Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post. According to a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, their original intent was "to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort." They were later published in several volumes.
A more recent collection, 1994's The Return of Simple, contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a Publishers Weekly critic who noted Simple's addressing of such issues as political correctness, children's rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes that the "charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. . . . Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won't allow him to brood over a failure very long. . . . Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun. This does not mean that Simple is in any way dull. He injects the ordinary with his own special insights. . . . Simple is a natural, unsophisticated man who never abandons his hope in tomorrow." A reviewer for Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: "The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives. It was not that ideas and events and places and people beyond the limits of Harlem—all of the Harlems—did not concern him; these things, indeed, were a part of his consciousness; but Simple's rock-solid common-sense enabled him to deal with them with balance and intelligence. . . . Simple knows who he is and what he is, and he knows that the status of expatriate offers no solution, no balm. The struggle is here, and it can only be won here, and no constructive end is served through fantasies and illusions and false efforts at disguising a basic sense of inadequacy. Simple also knows that the strength, the tenacity, the commitment which are necessary to win the struggle also exist within the Black community." Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key to Langston Hughes . . . was the poet's deceptive and profound simplicity. Profound because it was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colours and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God."
It was Hughes' belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that "most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been." Reviewing The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times in Poetry, Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes's "sensibility [had] kept pace with the times," but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance. "Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race," Lieberman commented. "A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes' politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically."
Despite some recent criticism, Hughes's position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. . . . His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson's or Robinson Jeffers'. . . . By moulding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."
The Block and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book are posthumously published collections of Hughes's poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes's poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bears the book's title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, "reflect Hughes's childlike wonder as well as his sense of humour." Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes's words, noting that "children love a good rhyme" and that Hughes gave them "just a simple but seductive taste of the blues." Hughes's poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music.
Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that Hughes "has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet."
Related Schools & Movements:
Harlem Renaissance
Jazz Poetry
Texts about this Poet:
Poets’ Odd Jobs
From the Archive: Langston Hughes’s 1966 Letter
On Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes Discussion Questions
A Reading Guide to Langston Hughes
Blues Poem: Poetic Form
Scrapple from the Apple: Jazz & Poetry
Black Radical Poetry: From African American Modernism to African American Experimentalism
A Brief Guide to Jazz Poetry
Langston Hughes: The Songs on Seventh Street
Walking Tour: Langston Hughes’s Harlem of 1926
Poems about Music
Harlem Renaissance
Jazz Poetry
Texts about this Poet:
Poets’ Odd Jobs
From the Archive: Langston Hughes’s 1966 Letter
On Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes Discussion Questions
A Reading Guide to Langston Hughes
Blues Poem: Poetic Form
Scrapple from the Apple: Jazz & Poetry
Black Radical Poetry: From African American Modernism to African American Experimentalism
A Brief Guide to Jazz Poetry
Langston Hughes: The Songs on Seventh Street
Walking Tour: Langston Hughes’s Harlem of 1926
Poems about Music
MORE ABOUT HUGHES
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he held odd jobs such as assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D. C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, (Knopf, 1930) won the Harmon gold medal for literature.
Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colourful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.
The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes “differed from most of his predecessors among black poets . . . in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.”
In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim, (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife, (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and co-wrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.
Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he held odd jobs such as assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D. C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, (Knopf, 1930) won the Harmon gold medal for literature.
Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colourful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.
The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes “differed from most of his predecessors among black poets . . . in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.”
In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim, (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife, (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and co-wrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.
Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”
Poetry
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967)
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961)
Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951)
One-Way Ticket (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949)
Fields of Wonder (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947)
Freedom’s Plow (Musette Publishers, 1943)
Shakespeare in Harlem (Alfred A. Knopf, 1942)
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (Knopf, 1932)
Scottsboro Limited (The Golden Stair Press, 1932)
Dear Lovely Death (Troutbeck Press, 1931)
Fine Clothes to the Jew (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927)
The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926)
Social Issues in Literature - Race - Race In the Poetry of Langston Hughes (Greenhaven Press)
Prose
Letters from Langston (University of California Press, 2016)
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)
The Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters (Dodd, Mead, 1980)
Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes (Hill, 1973)
Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965)
Something in Common and Other Stories (Hill and Wang, 1963)
Tambourines to Glory (John Day, 1958)
Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957)
I Wonder as I Wander (Rinehart, 1956)
Laughing to Keep From Crying (Holt, 1952)
Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953)
Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950)
The Ways of White Folks (Knopf, 1934)
Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930)
Drama
The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move (University of Missouri Press, 2000)
The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000)
Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991)
Five Plays by Langston Hughes (Indiana University Press, 1963)
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967)
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961)
Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951)
One-Way Ticket (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949)
Fields of Wonder (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947)
Freedom’s Plow (Musette Publishers, 1943)
Shakespeare in Harlem (Alfred A. Knopf, 1942)
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (Knopf, 1932)
Scottsboro Limited (The Golden Stair Press, 1932)
Dear Lovely Death (Troutbeck Press, 1931)
Fine Clothes to the Jew (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927)
The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926)
Social Issues in Literature - Race - Race In the Poetry of Langston Hughes (Greenhaven Press)
Prose
Letters from Langston (University of California Press, 2016)
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)
The Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters (Dodd, Mead, 1980)
Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes (Hill, 1973)
Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965)
Something in Common and Other Stories (Hill and Wang, 1963)
Tambourines to Glory (John Day, 1958)
Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957)
I Wonder as I Wander (Rinehart, 1956)
Laughing to Keep From Crying (Holt, 1952)
Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953)
Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950)
The Ways of White Folks (Knopf, 1934)
Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930)
Drama
The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move (University of Missouri Press, 2000)
The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000)
Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991)
Five Plays by Langston Hughes (Indiana University Press, 1963)
LANGSTON HUGHES 1902 - 1967
By the time the British artist Isaac Julien’s iconic short essay-film “Looking for Langston” was released, in 1989, Julien’s ostensible subject, the enigmatic poet and race man Langston Hughes, had been dead for twenty-two years, but the search for his “real” story was still ongoing. There was a sense—particularly among gay men of colour, like Julien, who had so few “out” ancestors and wanted to claim the prolific, uneven, but significant writer as one of their own—that some essential things about Hughes had been obscured or disfigured in his work and his memoirs. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, and transplanted to New York City as a strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old, Hughes became, with the publication of his first book of poems, “The Weary Blues” (1926), a prominent New Negro: modern, pluralistic in his beliefs, and a member of what the folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston called “the niggerati,” a loosely formed alliance of black writers and intellectuals that included Hurston, the author and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, the openly gay poet and artist Richard Bruce Nugent, and the novelists Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman (whose 1929 novel about colour fixation among blacks, “The Blacker the Berry,” conveys some of the energy of the time).
In a 1926 essay for The Nation, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes described the group, which came together during the Harlem Renaissance, when hanging out uptown was considered a lesson in cool:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If coloured people are pleased we are. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
And yet, in his personal life, Hughes did not stand on top of the mountain, proclaiming who he was or what he thought. One of the architects of black political correctness, he saw as threatening any attempt to expose black difference or weakness in front of a white audience. In his approach to the work of other black artists, in particular, he was excessively inclusive, enthusiastic to the point of self-effacement, as if black creativity were a great wave that would wash away the psychic scars of discrimination. Hughes was uncomfortable when younger black writers, such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (whom Hughes mentored from the day after he arrived in Harlem, in 1936, until it was no longer convenient for Ellison to be associated with the less careful craftsman), criticized other black writers. Hughes’s reluctance to reveal the cracks in the black world—which is to say, his own world—curtailed not only what he was able to achieve as an artist but what he was able to express as a man.
Instead of coming to grips with himself and his potential, he developed what he considered to be a palatable or marketable public persona. There he is, smiling, humble, industrious, and hidden, in Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume biography, “The Life of Langston Hughes” (1986 and 1988), not to mention in such important recent works about the period as Carla Kaplan’s “Miss Anne in Harlem” and Farah Jasmine Griffin’s “Harlem Nocturne” (both 2013). Even in much of his own correspondence—in the recently published “The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes,” edited by Rampersad and David Roessel, with Christa Fratantoro—one senses that Hughes is performing a version of himself that he feels is socially acceptable. (While “The Selected Letters” is a good place to start finding out about Hughes and his world, one sees more of his naughtiness and sense of play in some of the narrower collections, including “Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten,” which was edited with verve and insight by Emily Bernard.)
The Hughes persona also appears in his most celebrated verses, which marry down-home Southern locutions with urban rhythms.
From “The Weary Blues”:
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody. . . .
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Writing about Hughes’s “Selected Poems” in the Times in 1959, Baldwin—who chastised his elder for reducing blackness to a kind of pleasant Negro simplicity—began with a bang:
Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them. . . . Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand—or sleight of hand—by means of which Negroes express not only their relationship to each other but their judgment of the white world. . . . Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art, where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming.
Possibly, Baldwin—the author of the landmark gay love story “Giovanni’s Room”—was upset less by Hughes’s failures as a poet than by his refusal to reveal the truth behind his own hieroglyphics: his sexuality, which appears only in glimpses in his work. (And in the work of others, including Richard Bruce Nugent’s 1926 story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” which Hughes published in Fire!!, a literary magazine that Wallace Thurman edited, and in which a young man walking in Harlem bumps into “Langston,” who’s in the company of a striking boy.) Thurman, expressing his frustration at how little he knew about Hughes’s private self, wrote to him once, “You are in the final analysis the most consarned and diabolical creature, to say nothing of being either the most egregiously simple or excessively complex person I know.” Even Rampersad’s biography, which is as rich a study of a life as one could wish for, was criticized by gay readers for its emphatic I-don’t-know-anything-specific-about-his-romantic-life pronouncements. In Rampersad’s work, Hughes emerges as a constantly striving, almost asexual entity—which is pretty much the image that Hughes himself put forth.
Reading Hughes’s work, one is reminded of these lines by the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of Hughes’s early enthusiasms:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
That mask was what kept Hughes from including such works as “Café: 3 A.M.” in his “Selected Poems,” which he edited:
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where?
And where was Langston? His tight-lippedness when it came to his own “degenerate” behaviour kept him from identifying such people as “F.S.,” the dedicatee of another poem (who may have been Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican merchant seaman Hughes met in Harlem) that appeared in “The Weary Blues”:
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There is nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began--
I loved my friend.
Hughes’s genial, generous, and guarded persona was self-protective, certainly. It’s important to remember that he came of age in an era during which gay men—and blacks—were physically and mentally abused for being what they were. (He was self-preserving in other areas of his life as well. To protect his career, he testified at the House Un-American Activities Committee proceedings, which cost him his friendships with W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.) Hughes’s mask was likely also a bulwark against his personal history, which he rarely discussed, even in his elusive autobiographies, “The Big Sea” (1940) and “I Wonder as I Wander” (1956), one of the most apt titles ever penned by Hughes: his memoir is littered with short sojourns and partings, a pattern he learned in a home where the laughter was often derisive and love was a form of humiliation.
Hughes’s mother, the impulsive and vibrant Carrie Langston, was born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1873, of African, Native American, and French ancestry. Her father, Charles Langston, an enterprising farmer and grocer, was also a fierce abolitionist, whose youngest brother, John Mercer Langston, became a prominent figure in nineteenth-century black America—a professor of law, a dean, and then the acting president of Howard University. As a girl, Carrie Langston was known as “the Belle of Black Lawrence.” Hungry for attention, she aspired to a career on the stage, but her dreams were stymied by prejudice and by the limits of a nineteenth-century woman’s life. With few real options open to her, she completed a course in elementary-school education, and in 1898, already in love with travel, moved to Guthrie, in the Oklahoma Territory, some ten miles from Langston, a town named for her famous uncle. There the light-skinned Carrie met and married James Nathaniel Hughes, a handsome, hardworking man of colour, with African, Native American, French, and Jewish blood. (His grandfathers were both slave traders.) But there was a crucial difference between the newlyweds: whereas Carrie had been brought up to be proud of her race, the colour-struck James despised blackness, which he equated with poverty and powerlessness.
In 1899, the young, ambitious couple moved to Joplin, where Carrie gave birth to Langston in 1902. (Their first child, a boy, born in 1900, died in infancy.) A year later, when James secured a position in Mexico City, where he felt that he stood a better chance of success, Carrie dropped Langston off at her mother’s, and followed him south. The couple bickered, reconciled, parted, sometimes with Langston in tow, often not; for the most part, the boy was reared by his judicious but loving grandmother, Mary. By 1907, they had separated permanently.
There’s nothing like family to remind you of life’s essential loneliness. As a boy, Hughes absorbed his mother’s bitterness about her marriage and her thwarted career, as well as his father’s anxiety and rancour over racism in America and what he presumed to be its cause: blacks themselves. (Hughes recalled a train journey through Arkansas, during which his father, seeing some blacks at work in a cotton field, sneered, “Look at the niggers.”) Carrie never hesitated to tell her son that he resembled his father—“that devil”—and that he was as “evil as Jim Hughes.” His grandmother, angry about segregation—as a black person, she couldn’t join the church of her choice—forbade her grandson to go out after school: Why risk degradation in their sty?
Hughes grew up in an atmosphere of hatred and small-mindedness. While he was in elementary school, a white teacher warned one of Hughes’s white classmates against eating liquorice, for fear that he would end up looking like Langston.
A bright, genial boy, Hughes also suffered for his talents. From his poem “Genius Child”:
Nobody loves a genius child.
Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Can you love an eagle,
Wild or tame?
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?
Nobody loves a genius child.
Kill him—and let his soul run wild.
- Still, there was solace. There were books by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the formality and strange wisdom of the Bible. (Hughes read widely and deeply in the black and white American canons. And, throughout his career, he excitedly read the writers of color who were published in Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, including René Maran, Graziella Garbalosa, and Richard Rive.) There was black pride, too. In 1910, Mary and her grandson went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where former President Theodore Roosevelt honored her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had died during the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
- Mary herself died in 1915, and the thirteen-year-old Hughes soon left Kansas for Lincoln, Illinois, where his mother now lived with her second husband, Homer Clark, a sometime “chef cook,” and his son. In Lincoln, a teacher asked Hughes’s eighth-grade class to appoint a class poet who understood rhythm. Hughes’s fellow-students unanimously nominated Hughes, the only black boy in the class. Hughes wrote his first poem for the class graduation, and was so impressed by the applause he received that he wondered whether he had found his vocation. As Homer sought better career opportunities that never seemed to materialize, Hughes followed his mother and her new family to Cleveland, where he began contributing poems and stories to his high-school magazine. When his mother and his stepfather moved on again, to Chicago, Hughes stayed behind to finish high school, which he did in 1920. Although he was pretty much on his own from then on, his parents exercised a pull over him for as long as they lived. (“My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926-1938,” edited by Carmaletta M. Williams and John Edgar Tidwell, is valuable testimony to Carrie’s never-ending attempts to manipulate her son.)
Open to Hughes was the great wide world, the adventure of travel, and those writers—Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman—who not only freed the young writer from traditional literary forms but showed him that he could sing his America, too. In 1921, he moved to New York to study at Columbia University, but what he fell in love with was the “Negro city”: Harlem. (He eventually dropped out of Columbia, and graduated from Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, in 1929.) Before coming to New York, he had spent more than a year in patriarchal purgatory in Mexico; now he was “hungry” to be with his people. Exiting the subway at 135th Street, he said, “I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again.”
Harlem in the twenties offered up a cultural richness that made everything seem possible. Jervis Anderson, writing in this magazine in 1981, noted, “Harlem has never been more high-spirited and engaging than it was during the nineteen-twenties. Blacks from all over America and the Caribbean were pouring in, reviving the migration that had abated toward the end of the war—word having reached them about the ‘city,’ in the heart of Manhattan, that blacks were making their own.” The headquarters for Du Bois’s magazine Crisis, to which Hughes had been contributing from Mexico, was there; so was Messenger, co-edited by the activist A. Philip Randolph. Soon Hughes found a new source of the kind of support that his grandmother had given him as a boy: a wealthy white woman named Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided Hughes and other black artists, including Hurston, with financial backing, as long as they promoted blackness. (Despite the awkwardness of the arrangement, Hughes remained loyal to Mason—“I want to be your spirit child forever,” he wrote to her—and when he ceased to be a favorite, in 1930, he was devastated. That pain shows in his forced 1933 short story “Slave on the Block,” which he included in his passionate but ill-considered collection “The Ways of White Folks,” the following year.)- The charming Hughes also managed to melt the heart of the glacial Du Bois, who had lost a son, and counted Jessie Fauset, an editor at Crisis, and the poet Countee Cullen as champions of a sort. In 1923, Cullen introduced Hughes to Alain Locke, a gay Harvard-educated thinker, who published the influential anthology “The New Negro” in 1925. As one can intuit from “The Selected Letters,” the two embarked on a kind of cat-and-mouse game: Hughes needed Locke’s patronage, and, sensing the older man’s attraction to him, kept him at arm’s length to increase the mystery. Soon Hughes was a citizen of a bright black world that included Paul Robeson, who, in 1924, would star downtown in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” Putting his ear to the concrete, he heard poems like “Aesthete in Harlem,” which combined, within a short, intense form, the sound of the laughing and crying tom-tom he described in his 1926 Nation essay:
- Strange,
That in this nigger place
I should meet life face to face;
When, for years, I had been seeking
Life in places gentler speaking--
Before I came to this vile street
And found Life—stepping on my feet!
The poem, like many of Hughes’s early lyrics, is both interesting and uninspiring. We admire him for the pre-spoken-word cadences and the energy of the enterprise, but without ever knowing who his “I” is we have no anchor in the poem. The ungrounded first-person voice allows Hughes to be humanity, but not a specific human.
Once the Depression put an end to all the champagne and sexy miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, the “niggerati” scattered to other gigs, some in other countries. Hughes travelled in Russia during the thirties, finding in Communism, at least for a time, the political hope that was missing in his own country, but he always returned to Harlem, even as the neighbourhood suffered through race riots and the drug and civic wars of the fifties and sixties. It was his home until he died, in 1967—his ashes are now entombed in the lobby of the Langston Hughes Auditorium at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem—visible evidence of all that Hughes’s father despised and he embraced, in what may very well have been the most unresolvable relationship of his life.
In 1961, twenty-seven years after James Hughes died, his son wrote a brief, intense tale called “Blessed Assurance.” Published posthumously, it begins:
Unfortunately (and to John’s distrust of God) it seemed his son was turning out to be a queer. He was a brilliant queer, on the Honour Roll in high school, and likely to be graduated in the spring at the head of the class. But the boy was coloured. Since coloured parents always like to put their best foot forward, John was more disturbed about his son’s transition than if they had been white. Negroes have enough crosses to bear.
When the boy sings a solo in the church choir and his voice soars, a male organist faints, and the boy’s father pleads for him to shut up. But the song goes on. What is natural to John’s son is the music, a world of sound which he can both hide behind and expose himself through.
In the final years of his life, Hughes did seem to see the tide turning. His last, and best, collection of poems, “The Panther and the Lash” (1967), reflects, with a haiku-like flatness and lift, a Vietnam-era world that was changing and needed to change- His poem “Corner Meeting”:
Ladder, flag, and amplifier
now are what the soapbox used to be.
The speaker catches fire,
Looking at listeners’ faces.
His words jump down
to stand
in their
places.
Here Hughes writes with the force of a good journalist; he is no longer an abstract Negro everyman but a reporter weighing in on the heat and confusion of the time, without too much self-conscious hipster jive.
The novelist Paule Marshall recalls, in her 2009 memoir, “Triangular Road,” a 1965 government-sponsored tour of Europe on which she accompanied Hughes. It was during the heady days of the civil-rights movement. In Paris, a city that Hughes loved—“There you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself,” he said—Marshall noticed that when the subject of the movement came up Hughes let others do the talking. He knew what his own struggles had been, and he knew that the present struggle would lead to if not a different day then a different kind of day, one in which erasing lines from one’s own story might make less sense than just saying them. ♦
By Hilton Als - This article appears in the print edition of the February 23 & March 2, 2015, issue, with the headline “The Sojourner.”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner
BEST KNOWN POEMS
Life is Fine
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Weary Blues
I, Too
Let America Be America Again
Dream Deferred
I Too Sing America
Life is Fine
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Weary Blues
I, Too
Let America Be America Again
Dream Deferred
I Too Sing America
Poems: Study Guide
Langston Hughes wrote a myriad of plays, short stories, and essays, he is primarily known for his poetry, especially the verses he wrote during the Harlem Renaissance. Scholars and critics regularly refer to him the “African American Poet Laureate of Democracy,” creating a parallel between Hughes and Walt Whitman. Whitman, like Hughes, wrote about the everyday lives of American men and women using simple language to invoke grand themes in a relatable way. In 1926, the New York Herald Tribune described Langston Hughes's poems as “always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense.” Hughes frequently used his poetry to convey messages of racial justice and democracy. His distinct poetic voice celebrated the folkways, history, and daily lives of African Americans during the early 20th Century.
Hughes was an erudite and ambitious young man who started writing poetry at a very young age. He wrote his first jazz poem, “When Sue Wears Red,” when he was a teenager and was elected the class poet of his high school. After graduating, Hughes travelled to Mexico to visit his father. He crossed over the Mississippi River along the way, which inspired him to write one of his most famous poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers." “The Weary Blues,” published in 1926, earned Hughes the first place prize in Opportunity magazine's poetry competition. Later that year, Hughes included "The Weary Blues" in a volume of the same name which was published in late 1926. With The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes became widely recognized as a defining voice of the Harlem Renaissance. His poems were influenced by the rhythm of jazz and blues and celebrated the life and vitality he observed all around him in Harlem.
Hughes's poems explore the daily lives of working-class African Americans. He wanted to portray the dignity, soulfulness, and resilience of his people. His second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published in 1927 and cemented his reputation as a "poet of the people." Some critics found it difficult to embrace Hughes’s proletarian subjects and themes; the critic Hoyt F. Fuller wrote that Hughes “chose to identify with plain black people—not because it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people.”
Langston Hughes: Poems Summary
“Harlem” centres around the question of what happens to a dream when it is deferred – does it go away, fester, or explode?
In “The Weary Blues,” the speaker wanders down Harlem's Lenox Avenue at night and hears a lone musician playing the blues. The musician sways back and forth on his stool, singing mournfully about his loneliness and his wish to die. He finishes playing late at night, after which he goes home and sleeps.
In “Dreams,” the speaker counsels the readers to hold on tight to their dreams, for a life without dreams is comparable to a “broken-winged bird” and a "barren field."
In “Mother to Son,” a mother tells her son that her life has not been easy but she has always kept going. She does not want him to give up or turn back because she is still climbing the stairs.
In “I, Too,” the speaker claims that he "is America" even though he is forced to eat dinner in the kitchen when guests come. Someday, he knows that he will sit at the table and everyone will see how beautiful he is.
In “Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the speaker says he has known ancient rivers and his soul has grown deep like them. He has bathed in the bathed in the Euphrates, built his Congo, watched the pyramids rise along the Nile, and has even seen Lincoln on the Mississippi. He has known all of these “ancient, dusky rivers.”
In “My People,” the speaker exhorts the beauty of his African American people, comparing them to stars and the sun and the night.
In “Let America be America Again,” the speaker says that the American dream has never evolved into something more than a dream. Freedom and equality are not a reality for slaves, toiling immigrants, bondsman farmers, poor white people, or Native Americans. America has grown to embody greed and injustice; many citizens are trapped in a cycle of poverty with no channel for escape. However, these are the same people who once came to America possessing pure and inspiring dreams, and there is still a chance that those dreams can become reality. When that happens, America can be America again.
In “American Heartbreak,” the speaker says he (and all African American people) are the rock that American freedom stumped its toe on, and represent the mistake Jamestown made. He is referring to the disparity between the ideals of America's founders and the creation of a slave system.
In “Life is Fine,” the speaker describes his despair over a lost love. He tries to drown himself, but finds the water to be too cold. He thinks about jumping off a building, but it is too high. He eventually decides to keep living, proclaiming that he will be “dogged” if his baby sees him give up. Life, he concludes, is fine.
In “As I Grew Older,” the speaker explains that he had almost forgotten his dream from long ago. A thick wall descended between himself and his dream, casting a shadow on him. The speaker specifies that he is black and lies in that shadow. As he grows older, though, he decides to break through the wall with his hands, smashing the night and shattering it into sun so that he can be reunited with his dream.
In “April Rain Song,” the speaker delights in the sights and sounds of the spring rain.
In “Mulatto,” a biracial boy confronts his white father. The father, filled with rage, insists that he is not the boy's father. Instead, the white man claims that female slaves' bodies are toys and exist to satisfy the white man’s lust. The son addresses his white half-siblings, asking them if they consider their (white) mother's body to be a toy, but they, too, disown him. By the end of the poem, the speaker has come to terms with the role of biracial children in the world, and realizes that he is not alone.
In “Theme for English B,” a young African American college student works on an assignment - he must write a piece about himself that is true. He walks home and sits down in his Harlem apartment, explaining who he is and what he likes. He wonders if his writing is "colored" because he is "coloured." He eventually concludes that he and his white instructor are inextricably connected and can learn from each other.
In “50-50,” a woman plaintively laments her loneliness, wishing for a man to share her bed and hold her hand. A male voice tries to calm her down, offering to share her bed… and her money.
In “Harlem Sweeties,” the narrator extols the merits of the beautiful women in Harlem, comparing their varying skin tones to luscious sweets, desserts, and fruits.
“On the Road” is a short story about Sargeant, a large, unemployed black man who is trying to find solace during the Depression. One night, he comes to a parsonage in the hopes of finding shelter from the driving snow. The (white) Reverend, exemplifying racism and hypocrisy, refuses Sargeant entry, so he goes to the church next door. There, Sargeant finds the door locked, so he tries to push it open. White bystanders yell at him, but he insists that he needs a place to sleep. The cops arrive, but they come too late - Sargeant has pulled the whole church down, burying the bystanders in the rubble.
As he walks away from the ruins, Sargeant notices that Christ has descended from the cross and is walking alongside him. The two converse amiably and walk together for a short way. Christ says he is tired of this place and wants to move on - the white parishioners have imprisoned him on the cross but do not live by his teachings. The two travelers bid each other adieu at a hobo jungle by the train tracks, where Sargeant spends the night. The next morning, Sargeant catches a train. He feels a pain on his knuckles and jerks awake to realize he is not on a train but in a jail cell.
The harsh reality emerges: Sargeant never walked away from the church, In fact, he was jailed for trying to break in. Sargeant hollers at the policeman, who tells him to be quiet. Sergeant does not give into the policeman's demands, and threatens to pull the jail down. He then wonders out loud if Christ ever made it to Kansas City.
“Harlem” centres around the question of what happens to a dream when it is deferred – does it go away, fester, or explode?
In “The Weary Blues,” the speaker wanders down Harlem's Lenox Avenue at night and hears a lone musician playing the blues. The musician sways back and forth on his stool, singing mournfully about his loneliness and his wish to die. He finishes playing late at night, after which he goes home and sleeps.
In “Dreams,” the speaker counsels the readers to hold on tight to their dreams, for a life without dreams is comparable to a “broken-winged bird” and a "barren field."
In “Mother to Son,” a mother tells her son that her life has not been easy but she has always kept going. She does not want him to give up or turn back because she is still climbing the stairs.
In “I, Too,” the speaker claims that he "is America" even though he is forced to eat dinner in the kitchen when guests come. Someday, he knows that he will sit at the table and everyone will see how beautiful he is.
In “Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the speaker says he has known ancient rivers and his soul has grown deep like them. He has bathed in the bathed in the Euphrates, built his Congo, watched the pyramids rise along the Nile, and has even seen Lincoln on the Mississippi. He has known all of these “ancient, dusky rivers.”
In “My People,” the speaker exhorts the beauty of his African American people, comparing them to stars and the sun and the night.
In “Let America be America Again,” the speaker says that the American dream has never evolved into something more than a dream. Freedom and equality are not a reality for slaves, toiling immigrants, bondsman farmers, poor white people, or Native Americans. America has grown to embody greed and injustice; many citizens are trapped in a cycle of poverty with no channel for escape. However, these are the same people who once came to America possessing pure and inspiring dreams, and there is still a chance that those dreams can become reality. When that happens, America can be America again.
In “American Heartbreak,” the speaker says he (and all African American people) are the rock that American freedom stumped its toe on, and represent the mistake Jamestown made. He is referring to the disparity between the ideals of America's founders and the creation of a slave system.
In “Life is Fine,” the speaker describes his despair over a lost love. He tries to drown himself, but finds the water to be too cold. He thinks about jumping off a building, but it is too high. He eventually decides to keep living, proclaiming that he will be “dogged” if his baby sees him give up. Life, he concludes, is fine.
In “As I Grew Older,” the speaker explains that he had almost forgotten his dream from long ago. A thick wall descended between himself and his dream, casting a shadow on him. The speaker specifies that he is black and lies in that shadow. As he grows older, though, he decides to break through the wall with his hands, smashing the night and shattering it into sun so that he can be reunited with his dream.
In “April Rain Song,” the speaker delights in the sights and sounds of the spring rain.
In “Mulatto,” a biracial boy confronts his white father. The father, filled with rage, insists that he is not the boy's father. Instead, the white man claims that female slaves' bodies are toys and exist to satisfy the white man’s lust. The son addresses his white half-siblings, asking them if they consider their (white) mother's body to be a toy, but they, too, disown him. By the end of the poem, the speaker has come to terms with the role of biracial children in the world, and realizes that he is not alone.
In “Theme for English B,” a young African American college student works on an assignment - he must write a piece about himself that is true. He walks home and sits down in his Harlem apartment, explaining who he is and what he likes. He wonders if his writing is "colored" because he is "coloured." He eventually concludes that he and his white instructor are inextricably connected and can learn from each other.
In “50-50,” a woman plaintively laments her loneliness, wishing for a man to share her bed and hold her hand. A male voice tries to calm her down, offering to share her bed… and her money.
In “Harlem Sweeties,” the narrator extols the merits of the beautiful women in Harlem, comparing their varying skin tones to luscious sweets, desserts, and fruits.
“On the Road” is a short story about Sargeant, a large, unemployed black man who is trying to find solace during the Depression. One night, he comes to a parsonage in the hopes of finding shelter from the driving snow. The (white) Reverend, exemplifying racism and hypocrisy, refuses Sargeant entry, so he goes to the church next door. There, Sargeant finds the door locked, so he tries to push it open. White bystanders yell at him, but he insists that he needs a place to sleep. The cops arrive, but they come too late - Sargeant has pulled the whole church down, burying the bystanders in the rubble.
As he walks away from the ruins, Sargeant notices that Christ has descended from the cross and is walking alongside him. The two converse amiably and walk together for a short way. Christ says he is tired of this place and wants to move on - the white parishioners have imprisoned him on the cross but do not live by his teachings. The two travelers bid each other adieu at a hobo jungle by the train tracks, where Sargeant spends the night. The next morning, Sargeant catches a train. He feels a pain on his knuckles and jerks awake to realize he is not on a train but in a jail cell.
The harsh reality emerges: Sargeant never walked away from the church, In fact, he was jailed for trying to break in. Sargeant hollers at the policeman, who tells him to be quiet. Sergeant does not give into the policeman's demands, and threatens to pull the jail down. He then wonders out loud if Christ ever made it to Kansas City.
Langston Hughes: Poems Themes
Music, particularly blues and jazz, permeates Langston Hughes's oeuvre. Many of his poems have an identifiable rhythm or beat. The lines read like the verses in a blues song and echo themes that are common in blues music, like sorrow, lost love, anger, and hopelessness. Hughes frequently alludes to music that originated during the era of slavery, using a 'call and response' pattern for auditory effect and to create a link between the past and the present. By invoking the musical traditions of slaves, Hughes connects himself to the painful history of African Americans. Hughes's poetry, like jazz and blues, has a distinct and expressive tone, often depicting tales of sorrow, alienation, and loneliness.
The American Dream - Many of Langston Hughes’s poems invoke the theme of the American Dream. In 1931, James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream: "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." Hughes, however, addresses this concept from the perspective of the country's disenfranchised, including African Americans, Native Americans, downtrodden immigrants, and poor farmers. He portrays the glories of liberty and equality as out of reach for these populations, depicting individuals who are trapped under the fist of prejudice, oppression, and poverty. Their dreams die or are forgotten in a life defined by a desperation to survive. However, Hughes does often end his poems on a somewhat hopeful note, revealing his belief that African Americans (and others) will one day be free to pursue their dreams.
Dignity During Langston Hughes's time, his African American readers felt that the poet's work directly explored their lives, their hopes, their fears, their past, and their dreams - as opposed to the obtuse modernism of poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. The African American characters in Hughes’s oeuvre embody all the complexities of life in a segregated America. He writes from the point of view of struggling jazz musicians, frustrated dreamers, disenfranchised students, biracial children, and so on, finding dignity in their daily struggles. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Hughes's work calls attention to his characters' strength, endurance, and the purity of their souls. He praises their physical beauty as well, defying the "white" standards of beauty that dominated popular culture during the early 20th Century.
Aspiration Hughes often writes about aspirations as dreams. He explores hidden dreams, lost dreams, dreams regained, and dreams redeemed. African Americans, from the time of slavery to the oppression of the Jim Crow era, were treated like second-class citizens in the eyes of the American law. Hughes believed that this inferior social status forced most African Americans to hide their dreams behind a protective psychological barrier. For many of Hughes's characters, the American Dream is completely unattainable. Hughes expresses the power of dreams in different ways throughout his work. In one poem, Hughes comments that despite the difficulty of realizing these dreams, it is important for the disenfranchised to keep them alive in order to sustain the will to live. In another poem, Hughes writes that if these dreams remain dormant for long enough, then they might explode.
Racism While Langston Hughes's tone is softer than that of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers (not surprising, since Hughes lived in a different era), he has his own way of denouncing racism and depicting the oppression that African Americans experienced at the hands of the patriarchal system. He alludes to lost and forgotten aspirations, insinuating that African Americans are not allowed access to the American Dream because of their race. In “Mother to Son,” the mother describes the various vicissitudes she has faced, exacerbated or directly caused by the colour of her skin. In “On the Road,” one of Hughes’s best known short stories, he depicts racism as being tied up with religious hypocrisy. Hughes is realistic about the discriminatory environment that he lives in, but he also expresses hope that one day, the racial inequality in America will start to even out.
Wisdom While the word “wisdom” does not specifically occur this particular collection of Langston Hughes's poems, he clearly alludes to its attainment in many places. Hughes shows wisdom being passed down through generations, such as the mother who tells her son to never give up, even when the road is hard. Wisdom is a result of experience, and can inform one's decision to persevere in the face of adversity. Courage can lead to wisdom - there is priceless knowledge to be gained from confronting one's demons. Finding a mode of expression for sorrow - like music or poetry - is a form of wisdom in that a person can learn how to separate him or herself from bad experiences.
Self-Actualization Many of the speakers in Langston Hughes's poems start in situations of despondency and hopelessness. One has argued with a lover, another faces discrimination, a biracial man struggles with his identity, and so on. However, in these poems, Hughes commonly creates a narrative that culminates in the protagonist/speaker reaching a state of self- actualization. Despite his or her difficult surroundings, these individuals are able to find inherent inner strength, allowing them to persevere against the odds.
Music, particularly blues and jazz, permeates Langston Hughes's oeuvre. Many of his poems have an identifiable rhythm or beat. The lines read like the verses in a blues song and echo themes that are common in blues music, like sorrow, lost love, anger, and hopelessness. Hughes frequently alludes to music that originated during the era of slavery, using a 'call and response' pattern for auditory effect and to create a link between the past and the present. By invoking the musical traditions of slaves, Hughes connects himself to the painful history of African Americans. Hughes's poetry, like jazz and blues, has a distinct and expressive tone, often depicting tales of sorrow, alienation, and loneliness.
The American Dream - Many of Langston Hughes’s poems invoke the theme of the American Dream. In 1931, James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream: "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." Hughes, however, addresses this concept from the perspective of the country's disenfranchised, including African Americans, Native Americans, downtrodden immigrants, and poor farmers. He portrays the glories of liberty and equality as out of reach for these populations, depicting individuals who are trapped under the fist of prejudice, oppression, and poverty. Their dreams die or are forgotten in a life defined by a desperation to survive. However, Hughes does often end his poems on a somewhat hopeful note, revealing his belief that African Americans (and others) will one day be free to pursue their dreams.
Dignity During Langston Hughes's time, his African American readers felt that the poet's work directly explored their lives, their hopes, their fears, their past, and their dreams - as opposed to the obtuse modernism of poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. The African American characters in Hughes’s oeuvre embody all the complexities of life in a segregated America. He writes from the point of view of struggling jazz musicians, frustrated dreamers, disenfranchised students, biracial children, and so on, finding dignity in their daily struggles. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Hughes's work calls attention to his characters' strength, endurance, and the purity of their souls. He praises their physical beauty as well, defying the "white" standards of beauty that dominated popular culture during the early 20th Century.
Aspiration Hughes often writes about aspirations as dreams. He explores hidden dreams, lost dreams, dreams regained, and dreams redeemed. African Americans, from the time of slavery to the oppression of the Jim Crow era, were treated like second-class citizens in the eyes of the American law. Hughes believed that this inferior social status forced most African Americans to hide their dreams behind a protective psychological barrier. For many of Hughes's characters, the American Dream is completely unattainable. Hughes expresses the power of dreams in different ways throughout his work. In one poem, Hughes comments that despite the difficulty of realizing these dreams, it is important for the disenfranchised to keep them alive in order to sustain the will to live. In another poem, Hughes writes that if these dreams remain dormant for long enough, then they might explode.
Racism While Langston Hughes's tone is softer than that of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers (not surprising, since Hughes lived in a different era), he has his own way of denouncing racism and depicting the oppression that African Americans experienced at the hands of the patriarchal system. He alludes to lost and forgotten aspirations, insinuating that African Americans are not allowed access to the American Dream because of their race. In “Mother to Son,” the mother describes the various vicissitudes she has faced, exacerbated or directly caused by the colour of her skin. In “On the Road,” one of Hughes’s best known short stories, he depicts racism as being tied up with religious hypocrisy. Hughes is realistic about the discriminatory environment that he lives in, but he also expresses hope that one day, the racial inequality in America will start to even out.
Wisdom While the word “wisdom” does not specifically occur this particular collection of Langston Hughes's poems, he clearly alludes to its attainment in many places. Hughes shows wisdom being passed down through generations, such as the mother who tells her son to never give up, even when the road is hard. Wisdom is a result of experience, and can inform one's decision to persevere in the face of adversity. Courage can lead to wisdom - there is priceless knowledge to be gained from confronting one's demons. Finding a mode of expression for sorrow - like music or poetry - is a form of wisdom in that a person can learn how to separate him or herself from bad experiences.
Self-Actualization Many of the speakers in Langston Hughes's poems start in situations of despondency and hopelessness. One has argued with a lover, another faces discrimination, a biracial man struggles with his identity, and so on. However, in these poems, Hughes commonly creates a narrative that culminates in the protagonist/speaker reaching a state of self- actualization. Despite his or her difficult surroundings, these individuals are able to find inherent inner strength, allowing them to persevere against the odds.
"Life if Fine" Narrated by Hans Ostrom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRAMoBvc-04 Life is fine I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank. I came up once and hollered! I came up twice and cried! If that water hadn't a-been so cold I might've sunk and died. But it was Cold in that water! It was cold! I took the elevator Sixteen floors above the ground. I thought about my baby And thought I would jump down. I stood there and I hollered! I stood there and I cried! If it hadn't a-been so high I might've jumped and died. But it was High up there! It was high! So since I'm still here livin', I guess I will live on. I could've died for love-- But for livin' I was born |
LINKS
https://www.humanitiestexas.org/education/online-resources/ela/langston-hughes
https://www.loc.gov/search/?in=&q=Langston+Hughes&new=true
https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/1iFdxLliGy3WKGoF7GaXY0
https://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/langstonhughes/av.html
https://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/langston_hughes
https://literarydevices.net/mother-to-son/
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-symbolism-poem-mother-son-by-langston-hughes-545627
https://brightdreamsjournal.com/mother-son-langston-hughes-analysis-poem/
https://www.storyboardthat.com/lesson-plans/mother-to-son-by-langston-hughes
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-Harlem-What-Happens-to-a-Dream-Deferred-by-Langston-Hughes
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/life-is-fine/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN9DiUf4wgY
https://www.theherald.com.au/story/5023539/paul-kelly-tragedy-and-joy-makings-for-a-fine-life/
https://www.queenslibrary.org/blog/a-talk-with-langston-hughes-executive-director-andrew-jackson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRAMoBvc-04
https://www.paulkelly.com.au/music-life-is-fine/
www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/musicshow/the-music-show-sunday-12-november-2017/9130660 (LINK TO PAUL KELLY AND LIFE IS FINE ALBUM)
TEXTS AND HUMAN EXPERIENCES REFLECTED IN THE POEMS OF HUGHES
Suicide
Racism
Joy
Darkness
Light
Dreams
Poverty
Equality
Struggles
Despair
Loneliness
Courage
Inequality
Adversity