Watch The Secret Life Of The American Teenager Season three Episode 14
Hughes” commitment to Africa was real and concretized in both words and deeds.
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black
Being neither white nor black?
Hughes then became one of the poets who thought they felt the beating of the jungle tom-toms in the Negroes’ pulse.
In contrast, Hughes’ mother lived the transitory life common for black mothers often leaving her son in the care of her mother while searching for a job.
instilled in Hughes a sense of dedication most of all. Hughes lived successively with family friends, then various relatives in Kansas.
At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect.
At Central High School Hughes excelled academically and in sports. He wrote poetry and short fiction for the school’s literary magazine and edited the school year book. In it and such other pieces as “Jazzonia” Hughes evoked the frenzied hedonistic and glittering atmosphere of Harlem’s famous night-clubs.
Hughes’ earliest influences as a mature poet came interestingly from white poets.
But black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, a master of both dialect and standard verse, and Claude McKay, the black radical socialist an emigre from Jamaica who also wrote accomplished lyric poetry, stood for him as the embodiment of the cosmopolitan and yet racially confident and committed black poet Hughes hoped to be. W.E.B. Dubois’ collection of Pan-Africanist essays Souls of Black Folks has markedly influenced many black writers like Hughes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
Such colour-affirmative images and sentiments as that in “people”: The night is beautiful,/So the faces of my people and in ‘Dream Variations: Night coming tenderly,/ Black like me.
“Weary Blues” combines these various elements the common speech of ordinary people, jazz and blues music and the traditional forms of poetry adapted to the African American and American subjects.
Several reviewers in black newspapers and magazines were distressed by Hughes’ fearless and, ‘tasteless’ evocation of elements of lower-class black culture, including its sometimes raw eroticism, never before treated in serious poetry.
Hughes expressing his determination to write about such people and to experiment with blues and jazz wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” If white people are pleased we are glad.
Hughes expressed his determination to write fearlessly, shamelessly and unrepentantly about low-class black life and people inspite of opposition to that.
The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.
With his espousal of such thoughts defending the freedom of the black writer Hughes became a beacon of light to younger writers who also wished to assert their right to explore and exploit allegedly degraded aspects of black people.
In 1926 Hughes returned to school in the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he continued publishing poetry, short stories and essays in mainstream and black-oriented periodicals
In 1927 together with Zora Neal Hurston and other writers he founded Fire a literary journal devoted to African -American culture and aimed at destroying the older forms of black literature.
Then a 70 – year old wealthy white patron entered his life. Charlotte Osgood Mason, who started directing virtually every aspect of Hughes’ life and art. In his drama Hughes combines urban dialogue, folk idioms, and a thematic emphasis on the dignity and strength of black Americans.
employing several of his poems, vigorously blended black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation.
With the start of World War II, Hughes returned to the political centre.
In his book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the blues. Overwhelmed by the power of Lawrence’s stories, Hughes began writing short fiction of his. Simple became Hughes’s most celebrated and beloved fictional creation. Hughes was alert to what was happening in the African-American world and what was coming.
Hughes’ short stories reflect his entire purpose as a writer.
Hughes’s suffered constant harassment about his ties to the Left.
Hughes’s career hardly suffered from this.
By the end of his life Hughes was almost universally recognized as the most representative writer in the history of African American literature and also as probably the most original of all black American poets.
According to Arnold Rampersad, an authority on Hughes:
Much of his work celebrated the beauty and dignity and Humanity of black Americans. Unlike other writers Hughes basked in the glow of the obviously high regard of his primary audience, African Americans. ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ is timeless, “it seems as a statement of constant dilemma facing the young black artist, caught between the contending forces of black and white culture’
Like Walt Whitman, Hughes’s great poetic forefather in America’s poetry…, Hughes did believe in the poetry of Emotion, in the power of ideas and feelings that went beyond matters of technical crafts.
(i) lyrics about black life using rhythms and refrains from jazz and
blues.
(ii) Poems of racial protest
exploring the boundaries between black and white America.
But what Hughes is better known for is his treatment of the possibilities of African-American experiences and identities.
‘Toughness was a major characteristic of Hughes’ life. For his life was hard. Through all his poverty and hurt, Hughes kept on a steady keel.
so the faces of my people,
Hughes was also tender.
Hughes was a man of great generosity.
Here is a man with a boundless zest for life…
Hughes, Langston, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” 1926.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel, “Langston Hughes,” in Introduction to African
Rampersad, Arnold, The life of Langston Hughes Vol. 1 ; 11 Oxford
Trotman, James, (ed), Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art and His
Black Literature Criticism
The Oxford Companion to African American Literature., Oxford University Press,.1997
Langston Hughes – The Life, Times, Works as Well as Impact of a Versatile African-American Writer
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