Essay Database

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) absorbed America. In doing so, he wrote about many issues critical to his time period, including The Renaissance, The Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, Jazz, Blues, and Spirituality. Just as Hughes absorbed America, America absorbed the black poet in just about the only way its mindset allowed it to: by absorbing a black writer with all of the patronizing self-consciousness that that entails. The contradiction …

…be secure. Davis Littlejohn wrote: “[Hughes is] the one sure Negro classic… His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’… By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own ken honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own.”