Langston Hughes - Case Study Example

Langston Hughes Thanks to the increased urbanization brought on by a growing industrial revolution and the subsequent bringing together of many of the country’s African American citizens, primarily within the region of New York City known as Harlem, a great artistic movement that would eventually change the nation began to take root. The Harlem Renaissance, a period spanning roughly the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, is frequently referred to as a literary movement, but the movement also encompassed a great explosion of African-American expression in many venues that celebrated the unique heritage, art forms, sights and sounds that were the African-American experience. It was through the literature that much of this expression came to the attention of the rest of the nation, enabling it to have the tremendous impact it did on its own as well as future generations. One of the literary artists that gained the most recognition during this period was Langston Hughes. Hughes came into his professional years just as the Harlem Renaissance was becoming recognized on a more national scale and had the courage to both take inspiration from and yet disagree with his mentors such as W.E.B. DuBois by writing about the positive and negative aspects of black life. As he writes about the experiences of his life, Hughes encourages his readers to enter a deeper frame of thought through his use of music and image in poems such as “I, Too,” “The Weary Blues” and “Harlem.” In “I, Too,” Hughes discusses the treatment of the black man as he experienced in America: “They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes” (3-4), but also indicates the emerging strength of the black population as they gain greater human rights and more opportunity for education. “I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong” (5-7). As he gains in knowledge, wisdom and opportunity, Hughes recognizes that black people will not always be so easy to dismiss, again utilizing the metaphor of the dinner table: “Tomorrow, / I’ll be at the table / When company comes / Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / ‘Eat in the kitchen’, / Then” (8-14). While he expresses his outrage that he is still dismissed when company comes, he is also exultant that it won’t be long until many of his brothers will be educated just like him and able to lift up their unique voices. Once this is allowed to happen, Hughes is sure that the brilliance, creativity and spirit of his people will be recognized for the beautiful substance it has as will the contributions the black race has made to the development of the country. Hughes employs a short sentence structure and heavy beat in this poem for a reason. This three word sentence structure, termed tetrameter (Maulucci, 2009), establishes an energetic, hard-hitting beat. “Musical rhythms can put us in the mood for love or arouse us to other physical actions such as marching or dancing. Similarly, the appeal of some linguistic and poetic rhythms is irresistible. They travel our nervous system and intoxicate the brain or stimulate the heart, inducing gloom, excitation, contemplation, or euphoria” (Maulucci, 2009). Despite his isolation from ‘polite’ society as a result of the color of his skin, Hughes recognizes the ways in which he is growing strong right under the noses of those who would keep him down. These short statements help Hughes illustrate his outrage that he is still dismissed when company comes, but the energy of these lines suggest he is also exultant that it won’t be long until many of his brothers will be educated just like him and able to lift up their unique voices to add to the cultural mix that is America. Hughes also uses enjambment to pull his reader from one line to the next. According to Maulucci (2009), the way in which the poet divides his or her lines is often based upon the rhythm of the poem, but is also a matter of intuition, such as in determining just where to break the line for greatest effect. The unity formed of the poem from one line to the next enables Hughes to boldly claim in his final line, “I, too, sing America” (18). The poet demonstrates the same kind of deep connection with music as a means of anchoring the soul in his poem “Weary Blues.” The poem describes an evening when the narrator is listening to an old blues player on a piano down the street. The lines of the poem are interrupted at times with lines of verse from the song the old man is singing, suggesting he is making a deep connection with the narrator. “All the singer seems to have is his moaning blues … and those blues are what helps keep him alive. Part of that ability to sustain is apparently the way the blues help him keep his identity” (Tracy, 1988). In presenting this identity through the medium of his piano playing, the singer is also projecting an identity of the black race, speaking on a very deep unifying level with all the other black people within hearing that have had to suffer and experience many of the same things that have brought the singer to this point. The narrator, meanwhile, is attempting to analyze his reaction more intellectually. “He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. / Sweet Blues! / Coming from a black man’s soul. / O Blues!” (13-16). In this way, he becomes accessible to the reading white audience who has a difficult time letting go of the logical processes of retrieving information and allowing the emotional connection to flow. As he allows the notes of the blues player’s song to drift off the end of the page into the reader’s imagination, he soothes his readers into a deeper connection with the meaning of the poem. Working within the rhythm of the music, the poem begins with more statement than verse but ends almost entirely in verse, pulling the narrator and the reader into the depth of the song and encouraging a similar connection between the reader and the poet and the words and their meaning. In the rhythm of the poem, Hughes allows the reader to experience how the music became the soul and the souls became connected on a level deeper than the surface confusions and heartaches. “The piano itself comes to life as an extension of the singer, and moans, transformed by the black tradition to a mirror of black sorrow that also reflects the transforming power and beauty of the black tradition. Finally, it is that tradition that helps keep the singer alive … with the blues echoing beyond his playing, beyond the daily cycles, and through both conscious and unconscious states” (Tracy, 1988). It thus becomes necessary for the narrator and the singer in Hughes’ poem to dive deep into their music in order to discover a means of saving themselves. As they do this, the thinking reader finds himself diving with them, discovering dark and largely unknown things within themselves that are only visible in the reverberating effects of the music sounding within them. Accustomed to the central role of music within his work, Hughes describes the deadening effects of the restrained self in his poem “Harlem.” He provides several ways in which a person’s dreams may need to be deferred, which, in turn, presents several conceptions of what might happen to the individual when the dream dies. Throughout his poem, Hughes forces his reader to consider what happens to the human soul when they are unable to fulfill their dreams. He uses simile and metaphor to make his point as he continues to ask a series of questions to answer his original opening question of “what happens to a dream deferred?” (Fandel, 2005). This list of questions explores the various ways in which the first question might be answered by using simile to suggest the possible results. The first possibility/simile Hughes suggests is that the dream might “dry up / like a raisin in the sun” (3-4), suggesting something so dried and hard that it no longer functions as it should. The second possibility is that the dream might “fester like a sore – / and then run” (4-5). In this situation, the dream is like a wound that won’t heal and that oozes everywhere. The third possibility is that the dream deferred might “stink like rotten meat / or crust and sugar over” (6-7). In this possibility, the dream has become like something unpleasantly hard and containing an unpleasant odor. Another possibility Hughes brings forward through the use of simile is that the deferred dream might be like a heavy load (10). Throughout the poem, he continues to point to the larger metaphor of the dream as the individual’s potential and goals in life. The format used by Hughes in his poem drives the reader deeper into the meaning more than the words of the poem, distancing somewhat from his musical tendencies to focus on the underlying importance of the message he’s trying to send. In the first case, a raisin is capable of providing the individual with a sweet and nutritious treat thus strengthening them and giving them fuel and encouragement for any difficulties ahead. Instead, Hughes suggests it is left drying in the sun, losing all of its nutritional qualities as these become too deeply embedded in the impossible-to-eat fruit to make it worth searching for. The second possibility introduces the imagery of a festering sore that eventually ‘runs.’ It is impossible to consider that Hughes selected this term accidentally, instead of using the more accurate word ‘ooze.’ In this possibility, Hughes suggests that the dream put on hold will continue to nag at the soul, always eating away at it until finally the soul gives in and runs, taking the physical form of the individual with it, in pursuit of the dream regardless of the final cost. In this situation, the individual becomes incapable of waiting any longer. The third possibility introduces imagery intended to incite the sense of smell rather than sight as the dream is subsumed under a hollow exterior that performs its functions as is expected but fails to completely mask the underlying resentment and anger. The fifth question immediately conjures up any images the reader might have of times in which they struggled with a load too heavy for them and realize how inevitable it was that they had to give up and seek assistance or concede the load would not be moved. Hughes ends the poem with the question, “Or does it explode?” (11). Because he doesn’t compare it with anything or confine it in any way, Hughes allows this line to be vaguely threatening, loose and chaotic. Through this exploration of what happens to a dream deferred, or a person constrained unnaturally into social or external expectations, Hughes suggests the individual will become hollow, bitter, spoiled, defeated or insane. With his careful linking of brilliant creativity, highlighting not only his own abilities but the abilities of his fellow black men as well, and his sense of history and perseverance of the race, it is no surprise that Langston Hughes emerged as the spokesperson for the Harlem Renaissance. He celebrated his people’s accomplishments even while he acknowledged their weaknesses, whether it was through a lack of opportunity or a lack of educated (white man’s) language. His refusal to couch his poems in the language of the educated white man enabled him to capture more of the culture and diversity of the people he was trying to expose to the world and served as a role model for younger generations who also felt the need to expose the trials and triumphs of their race. Through his poems, Hughes managed to demonstrate that just because one is entering deep water does not necessarily mean one is on the verge of drowning. The confusion and the dissociation of the white-dominated culture was itself a whirlpool of conflicting elements that could cause one to lose touch with the self even when one remained entirely isolated within the black community. There is a sense of desire to enter the white man’s world in “I, Too” as the narrator dreams of greater equality, a disconnection to the black race discovered in “The Weary Blues” as the narrator begins to describe the scene in front of him from an intellectual rather than an emotional perspective and there is a frustrated note found in “Harlem” as the black man continues to search for a sense of identity that retains the best of both worlds. However, through the medium of the rhythm and the brilliance of imagery, Hughes’ audience is pulled into the depths of the sound, feeling it in the root of their souls and discovering that the depths they had feared would drown them have actually proven to be their salvation. This salvation has already been discovered by those who play the music, such as the old man and the poet himself, but it requires the connection with other people sharing the same soul issues before its potential can be fully realized. Works Cited Fandel, Jennifer. Metaphors, Similes and Other Word Pictures. New York: Creative Education, 2005. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics, 1995. Maulucci, A.S. “Writing Rhythmic Poetry.” Interaction Media Group. (2009). May 6, 2010 Tracy, Stephen C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Read More