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             The Harlem Renaissance can be considered on of the most significant events in African-American literature and culture in the twentieth century. While its most obvious manifestation was as a self-conscious literary movement, it also touched almost every aspect of African-American culture and intellectual life in the period from World War I to the Great Depression: it's impact redefined black music, theater, and visual arts; it reflected a new more militant political and racial consciousness and racial pride that was associated with the term "New Negro;" it embodied the struggle for civil rights and most important, was its force as a literary and intellectual movement (Hutchinson 125). With this outburst of literary activity, a man named Langston Hughes started to write poems about life in Harlem. Hughes's poetry absorbed the rhythms of blues and jazz and the dialect of African-American speech that he heard around him. He had written through the 1930s and the 1940s, speaking fo!
             r the poor and homeless black people who suffered during the Great Depression. He wrote of their daily lives in American cities, of their anger and their loves. Black people loved reading his works and hearing him read his poems at public presentations all over the country ("Langston").
             The Harlem Renaissance was a self-conscious movement. Specifically the writers and poets who participated in the movement were aware that they were involved in a literary movement and assumed responsibility for defining the practicalness of that movement. However, while it was self-conscious, the Harlem Renaissance lacked an idealistic center. It was more a community of writers, poets, critics, patrons, sponsors, and publishers than a structured and focused intellectual movement. It may be best stated as an attitude or a state of mind- a feeling shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals who centered their activities in Harlem in the 1...

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