Subjects:
words. An African American Hughes became a well known poet, novelist, journalist, and
Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was
brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Her second husband
(Hughes's grandfather) was a fierce abolitionist. She helped Hughes to see the cause of social
As a lonely child Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while
in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921 he entered Columbia University, but left after an
unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe,
a busboy, and a dishwasher, his poetry appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis
(NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League).1 As a poet, Hughes was the first person to
combine the traditional poetry with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.
As a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the
movements best known poet. He published two poetry collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).2 Mainly becaus
. . .
included another book of poetry, almost a dozen children's books, several opera libretti, four
books translated from French and Spanish, two collections of stories, another novel, a history of
the NAACP and another volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander (1956).
“Hughes was fascinated with black music, tried his hand at writing lyrics, and was taken with the
possibilities of performing music and poetry together” 4
“Besides having both a love of this music and the common black folk it was created by
and for, one of the reasons that Hughes began to draw on the blues tradition for writing his
poetry is that he hoped to capitalize on the blues craze. These are often called blues in the classic form and about
half of his blues poems fit this structure. He attacked segregation, especially in his column in the black weekly Chicago
Defender, where he created a comic but keen black urban Every man, Jesse B. Hughes bought a house in Harlem, where he spent the rest of his
life. For example,
“By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway
he did a lazy sway
To the tune of those weary blues”11
. 3
In 1947, as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice on the Broadway opera Street Scene,
Hughes received great success. So the poem is implying that you should not let
anything get in the way of your dreams. In this beautiful poem, Hughes delineates a distance between the narrator of a poem and the
blues man playing as if to make known to the world the distance between the poet and “his
people”. Yale New Haven Teachers
Institute.
1997
The New Modern American and British Poetry.
Essay's Topics
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