Langston Hughes Essay

Of the major portentous writers who front made their appearance during the provoke period of the 1920s commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was the roughly prolific and the most successful. As the Harlem Renaissance gave way to the Depression, Hughes determined to sustain his career as a poet by bringing his poetry to the people. At the bring upion of bloody shame McLeod Bethune, he launched his career as a public speaker by embarking on an extensive lecture tour of the South.As he wrote in his autobiography Propelled by the backwash of the Harlem Renaissance of the ahead of time twenties, I had been vagrant along pleasantly on the delightful rewards of my poems which waitmed to please the fancy of kindhe maneuvered New York ladies with money to help young writers. . . . There was one other(a) dilemmahow to make a living from the kind of penning I wanted to do. . . . I wanted to write seriously and as easy as I knew how about the pitch blackness people, and make that kind of writing earn me a livin (Hughes, 196431).Alain Locke, the leading exponent of The New pitch blackness, announced that the morose passel had found their voice A square(a) peoples poet has their balladry in his veins and to me many of these poems seem based on rhythms as veteran(a) as folksongs and on moods as kabbalistic-seated as folk-ballads. Dunbar is supposed to pay back expressed the peasant he artistic production of the people. But Dunbar was the showman of the Negro masses here is their spokesman (Killens ed.196041). Though much of the poetry Hughes was to write in the thirties and afterwardward was to differ markedly in terms of social matter from the poetry he was producing in the twenties, a careful examination of his early work will reveal, in germinal form, the basic themes which were to preoccupy him passim his career. Hughess evolution as a poet can non be seen apart from the bunch of his life which thrust him into the section o f poet.Indeed, it was Hughess awareness of what he in person regarded as a rather unique childhood which determined him in his drive to express, through poetry, the feelings of the black masses and their questions of identity. In The Weary colour, Hughes presented the problem of dual consciousness quite cleverly by placing 2 parenthetical statements of identity as the opening and closing poems, and titling them Proem and Epilogue. Their opening lines suggest the polarities of consciousness betwixt which the poet located his own character I Am a Negro and I, Too, Sing America. Within each of these poems, Hughes suggests the interrelatedness of the cardinal identities the line I am a Negro is echoed as I am the darker brother in the closing poem. Between the American and the Negro, a third identity is suggested that of the poet or singer. It is this latter persona which Hughes had assumed for himself in his attempt to resolve the dilemma of divided consciousness. Thus, within t he confines of these dickens poems revolving around identity, Hughes is presenting his poetry as a kind of salvation.If one looks much closely at Hughess organization of poems in the book, one finds that his true opening and closing poems are concerned not with identity provided with patterns of cyclical time. The Weary Blues (the first poem) is about a black piano man who plays deep into the night until at last he falls into sleep like a rock or a man thats dead. The last poem, on the other transcend, suggests a rebirth, an awakening, after the long night of weary blues We have tomorrow/ twinkling(prenominal) before us/Like a flame (Hughes 1926109).Hughes viewed the poets role as one of responsibility the poet must strive to maintain his objectivity and exquisite aloofness, while at the same time speaking with passion through the medium he has selected for himself. In a speech devoted before the American Society of African Culture in 1960, Hughes urged his fellow travell er black writers to cultivate objectivity in dealing with blackness Advice to Negro writers Step outside yourself, then look back and you will see how human, yet how beautiful and black you are.How very black even when youre integrated (Killens ed. 196044). In another part of the speech, Hughes stressed art oer race In the great sense of the word, anytime, any place, good art transc revokes land, race, or nationality, and color drops away. If you are a good writer, in the end neither blackness nor whiteness makes a difference to readers (Killens ed. 196047).This philosophy of artistic distance was integral to Hughess argument in the much earlier essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, which became a rallying expect to young black writers of the twenties concerned with reconciling artistic freedom with racial expression It is the duty of the younger Negro artist if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering I wa nt to be white enigmatical in the aspirations of his people, to Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro and beautiful In this greatly thought-out manifesto, Hughes act to integrate the two facets of double consciousness (the American and the Negro) into a case-by-case vision-that of the poet. His poetry had reflected this idea from the beginning, when he published The Negro Speaks of Rivers at the historic period of nineteen. Arna Bontemps, in a retrospective glance at the Harlem Renaissance from the distance of almost fifty years, was referring to The Negro Speaks of Rivers when he commented And almost the first phonation of the revival struck a note that disturbed poetic tradition. (Addison ed. 198883). In Hughess poetry, the central element of importance is the affirmation of blackness. Everything that distinguished Hughess poetry from the white poets of the twenties revolved around this important affirmation. melodious idioms, jazz rhythms, Hughess special brand of bl ack-white irony, and dialect were all unfree on the priority of black selfhood I am a Negro/Black as the night is black/Black like the depths of my Africa (Hughes 1926108). Hughes wrote in his autobiography My best poems were all written when I felt the worst.When I was happy, I didnt write anything (Hughes 199154). When he first began writing poetry, he felt his lyrics were too individualized to reveal to others Poems came to me now spontaneously, from somewhere inside. . . . I put the poems down quickly on anything I had a hand when they came into my head, and later I copied them into a notebook. But I began to be acrophobic to show my poems to anybody, because they had become very serious and very much a part of me. And I was afraid other people might not like them or understand them (Hughes 34).These two statements regarding his poetry suggest deep underlying emotional tensions as being the source of his creativity. And yet the personal element in Hughess poetry is almost ent irely subaquatic beneath the persona of the Negro Poet Laureate. If, as Hughes suggested, personal unhappiness was the derriere of his best work, it then follows that, in order to maintain the singleness of pattern and devotion to his art, he would be required to sacrifice some floor of emotional stability.The persona of the poet was the role Hughes adopted in his very first published poem, as the Negro in The Negro Speaks of Rivers. It was a persona to which he would remain faithful throughout his lengthy career. The link between his personal experiences and his poetry has been always evident.References Addison Gayle, Jr. , ed. (1988). Negro Poets, Then and Now, in Black Expression Essays by and About Black Americans in the fictive Arts, New York Weybright & TalleyLangston Hughes (1964). I Wonder As I Wander, New York heap & Wang Langston Hughes (1926). The Weary Blues, New York Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, reprinted, 1982 Langston Hughes (1991). The Big Sea An Autobiography . 1940. New York Hill & Wang Killens, washstand O. ,ed. (1960). Writers Black and White, The American Negro Writer and His Roots Selected papers from the First Conference of Negro Writers, March. New York American Society of African Culture