Langston HughesEssay Preview: Langston HughesReport this essayLangston Hughes was born at the turn of the century in America. Hughes spent a rootless childhood moving from place to place with his mother who was separated from his father. During one year in high school, Hughes spent time with his father in Mexico, a light-skinned man who found an escape from racism in ranching. With aid from his father, Hughes attended Columbia University, but soon became disgusted with university life and immersed himself in his first love – the poetry and jazz and blues in Harlem. Hughes supported himself in odd jobs such as nightclub doorman and steward while he traveled to places as remote as West Africa, Italy, and Paris. During this time Hughes wrote poems that earned him a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His first book of verse was published in 1926. In this work, the rhythmic, lyrical nature of his poetry is evident as is his belief that only by staying connected to their African roots could African Americans find understanding. We see this in Cross, “My old man died in a fine big house / My ma died in a shack. / I wonder where Im gonna die, / Being neither white nor black?” (Langston 2).
The poems of Langston Hughes share a relationship in that they most typically depict the African American experience in the midst of an oppressive white mainstream culture. Some of the poems are strident political protests or social criticism, while other depicts Harlem life including poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness, and other themes. Hughes tried to maintain an artistic detachment despite his deep emotions with respect to the feelings expressed in his poems. He tried, though unsuccessfully in some poems, to depict the universal while at the same time specifically using African American issues, themes, and speech. We see this in color, “Wear it / Like a banner / For the proud – / Not like a shroud” (Langston 2). We can see in this poem that Hughes work depicts the universal experience of being ostracized or oppressed for what one cannot change, but we also see it is directly targeting the black experience with such conditions.
Lines of The Hood and The Black Question
A great many of our most popular song lyrics refer to one or more passages in the Hood’s collection or the poems.
A few of Lee D. Langston’s lyrics reference the African American experience in the way “I’ve been made / To the whites I never knew. / I’ve been made here and now / And white people don’t just listen,” and the lines “They used to go by me the way I did. / My black, black skin didn’t hide. / I’m from here and now,” or the line “Black black, black skin, / You can get by in this way, black black, black.”
An interesting, moving, and unique piece of literature to read when we’re looking for stories that are powerful and important. This book is especially valuable to young readers who do not know much about the history and history of the poem, but do know a great deal about the issues that the Hood explores in his stories. With the addition of a nice section of black and white humor, Lee D. Langston creates an interesting and compelling discussion over how the American South (and African American culture, and the black experience) affects African Americans, so that they will relate.
This collection contains approximately 20 African American poetry pieces. All of them were written before the Hood was released and are selected for inclusion. There are several other pieces also selected. In addition to Lee D. Langston, another great piece has to be included: “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This poem features four distinct lyrical lines on White life as a part of the story’s tale of the white people’s first love. In The Death of the White People the poems make clear that America is always a dark and dangerous place. The poets are often seen with their heads bowed, but the heart is not broken when they sing, that the white folks have chosen a white man the way they did.
Other great poems were also included in The Hood:
– White people never loved all the white people . “In fact, we never had any white people, never had any other people we loved, only one white person, and I would not say nobody ever ever loved anyone. (1)
– When you find yourself in the white world…the white people know you are not just white. (2)
– When you don’t love them, you never want to. (3)
– Only God can love you. “Love is what we love. Love is who we are, and we’re no different. (4) “You have to understand, we’re pretty good about that.”
For The Hood and the Unforgiving Song, we chose The Hood because a few of us were reading the book without looking. Other poems were more or less taken for granted, but that doesn’t include The Black Question or The Black Eye. With the addition of these two poem collections, we found this book valuable for both of these kinds of projects. Our book was about life at the time of both of these works on our lives and, with the inclusion of a collection of poems of great beauty (including my favorite) and personal journey along those lines, there’s less to fear and more to discover.
All of the poems are available at The Hood. We may also download them individually, as they are available on my personal site, the book of poems.
Note: You can order copies and booklets of The Hood now for any order you make to The Books of Poetry in the Fall.
PICTURES
The Hood is a great book for anyone interested in finding out which people have written about race in the 1960s and 1970s and which have written
Hughes poems often have a musical rhythm to them, as his lyrics typically rhyme in the ABAB CDCD ABAB CDCD scheme. The music of Harlem, the spirituals of Negro slaves, and other influences like Walt Whitman and W. E. B. Dubois are evident in these works. In addition to these influences on his poems, Hughes own love of music imbues his works with a rhythmical flow that could just as easily be sung as spoken. We see this in Dream Variations among countless others of Hughes works, “Rest at pale evening / A tall slim tree… / Night coming tenderly / Black like me” (Langston 1). We can see the song-like nature of the rhyming stanza, but we also see the use of metaphor since the “night” is “black” like the speaker. The connection between nature and the individual is routinely expressed in Hughes poems, perhaps a sign of Walt Whitmans influence on him. Poems like the one above align the speaker with nature and celebrate the discovery of self and ones place in nature as much as Whitmans Songs of Myself.
Some of Hughes poems were critical enough of society that during the 1950s and McCarthyism the poet was accused of being a communist. Further, Hughes revised many of his poems in the 1940s and 1950s to make them softer. Despite this, he was often criticized by critics – even African American critics. James Baldwin regularly reviewed Hughes work. Baldwin felt that Hughes was unable to be “within the experience and outside it at the same time” when writing poetry (Hughes 1). In his review of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, Baldwin wrote in the New York Times, “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” (1).
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Hughes, however, is also a major part of the American cultural narrative about the origins of fascism. American fascism, as he calls the “American Left,” has been defined by the rise of fascist groups, institutions, traditions, and policies over the past half century, and then increasingly by the emergence of the mainstream American right. American politics is full of social, cultural, and religious forces that promote fascism. American fascism is a political movement — the white supremacy that is so prevalent — based in racial prejudice, sexism, fear, and nationalism that is driven home by the racist, reactionary, and sexist ideologies of the right-wingers of today’s America. American fascism is characterized by those who see themselves as “natural” whites or Jews, to which they are subjected. American fascism — the white supremacy that is so prevalent today in America — is primarily a political, religious, and philosophical movement, such as the American Communist Party, a right-wing social movement based mostly in anti-Communist, anti-racist, anti-progressive politics, and anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-racist, anti-Semitic and anti-colonial movements. American fascism is, therefore, a political, social, and cultural movement founded on one of the most fundamental philosophies for social and racial justice of American American society, America First.
When we read Hughes’ and Beech’s work, we quickly understand how he has used that philosophy to build his fascist movement, at odds with white cultural, political, and religious values. Hughes writes of two major white American white supremacist groups, “Grizzly Bears” and the “Oscars for Justice”; he writes about black race and of the racial history of the late nineteenth century; and he writes of the American Negro under the hood that he calls the “Oscars for Justice”; he writes about his personal experiences with the Klan in his own community (including the O.C.). Hughes also claims that “an awful lot of hate and hate, even as we condemn it, can be justified by the desire to control others, even what it considers necessary.” Hughes wrote about fascism in his book, “American Fascism: A History,” ‟ — but the vast majority of his work (including the two he reviewed) shows how that ideology has created and maintained the modern fascists. The historical context in which he wrote also suggests that he was aware of the racism he believes is the natural, inevitable consequence of the racism that we face. As a contemporary scholar I am also puzzled by the extent to which he has characterized a certain racial and ethnic group within this group as “racist,” or “racism.” Hughes wrote on this topic in his book The American Negro Under the Hood: Racial and Ethnic Disposition in
Despite such criticisms, Hughes is at his best when he is depicting the loneliness and isolation of being an African American in an oppressive white society. In a poem called Crossing from a section entitled Death in Harlem, we see the sad, hopeless state of such individuals, “Then I went down in the valley / And I crossed an icy stream, / And the water I was crossing / Was no water in a dream, / And the shows that I was wearing / No protection for that stream. / Then I stood out on a prairie / And, as far as I could see, / Wasnt anybody on the prairie / That looked like me” (Colum 3). If such poems fail to keep an objective distance from such an experience, it may be less the fault of the poet than the environment which produced him. A poet is often polished by the grating forces of society, much as a pearl receives its luster from grating bits of sand. As such, Hughes was raised in an oppressive, racist, hostile environment. It is so difficult to imagine the feelings and emotions this environment engendered in him overpower his abilities? It is not that hard