“The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.” — Langston Hughes

The Blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter … of a sadness where there is no god to appeal to.
— Langston Hughes

It’s his birthday today.

The 20th century is incomprehensible without Langston Hughes. Or, at least, incomplete. No understanding is possible without taking into account his work and his legacy.

Consider the complicated in-real-time responses his work generated – because it tells its own story:

Hughes got a lot of flak from the rising Black middle-class at the time: they thought the forms he used – jazz rhythms, slang, colloquialisms – lacked dignity and weren’t a positive representation of the community. One middle-class Black newspaper referred to Hughes as a “sewer dweller”. To contrast, Countee Cullen, another extraordinary poet of the Harlem Renaissance (post about him here), used European literary forms, i.e. sonnets, and regular meter and rhythms, and called for Black writers to embrace the rich tradition of white European literature. At the time, and in the moment, there was an informal – or even formal – “I reject Langston Hughes and embrace Countee Cullen” thing going on (or the opposite). There was not a consensus around either of these guys. This was a fraught conversation in the ‘teens and ’20s. Still is.

An individual is assumed to speak for all (and sometimes required to speak for all), not just by outsiders but by the community they “represent”. Whichever way it goes, the aforementioned “otherized” community will be pigeon-holed, stereotyped: there are real-world dangers attached to this. Dehumanization doesn’t happen overnight. Dehumanizing comes from a scarcity of different kinds of voices. It is much easier to “otherize” the unknown. Sometimes the call comes from inside the house, and you’re criticized by “your own” for not performing to their expectations, or for going against the prevailing consensus. It feels like the next stage in species evolution is to
1. realize we’re all in this together
and
2. seemingly conversely, accept that no group is monolithic.

I experience a version of this as a woman. The shit I’ve gotten has been 90% from other women, and even saying this is seen as a betrayal by the “group” I am a part of. You’re called a “pick me girl” or a “cool girl”. No. I am an individual. I reject assumption of agreement. I don’t like required consensus. I have also been lectured by men who think I am not feminist enough, which is just so ridiculous.

In regards to Langston Hughes, these issues are more obvious in retrospect. During the Harlem-Renaissance period, Cullen, Hughes (and others) wrote essays calling for fellow Black artists to follow their individual example, and these examples were often in opposition to one another. It was a vigorous cultural debate. This is good, I think! We need more of this, not less. It’s healthy! In college, I took a class on the Harlem Renaissance in college, and this is where I first encountered many of these voices (beyond Hughes, that is, was in our high school curriculum). In the college class, we read all of these essays where writers proclaimed their views on writing, on being Black, on being a Black artist, on what Black writing should (and should not) be. Much of this played out in the pages of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine.

Now onto Hughes and his work:

Langston Hughes was a very well-read man (consider the breadth of references in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, written at the astonishingly young age of 17).

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes moved to New York in 1921 to attend Columbia. After only a year of school, he took off for Paris. He returned to America a couple of years later, and by that point was getting published. He wrote novels, political essays, poems, and in 1926 he published an essay titled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, one of THE documents in the history of 20th-century American cultural life. In the essay, he called out the self-loathing, as he saw it, in Black artistic circles. His tough talk sparked waves of responses, counter-arguments, resistance, support. The controversy – with so many different voices weighing in – helped articulate an entire era, its concerns and diversity, its challenges.

Langston Hughes was the first Black poet to make his living from poetry. An incredible accomplishment (for anyone of any race. Poets who make their living – ANY kind of living – solely from poetry can be counted on maybe 10 fingers.)

Hughes’ enormous artistic breakthrough was due to his influence from Black American music, not white European literature. He pushed the vernacular into the mainstream, but it came through his prism altered. His poetry is in the slang of the specific community – this is often where the greatest poetry lies! This is how language develops, how poetry develops – the general throughline has been to accept more and more voices into its continuum (often facing resistance). Robert Burns did this. He brought the dialects he heard around him into literature. Chaucer is probably the prime example of this since he came so damn early. He helped CREATE the language we speak today, and he did so by amplifying the voices of people on the ground. Local humble people. Barmaids, farmers, drunks, floozies. Poetry like this is how other people – maybe even those who resist it – are able to start HEARING voices outside the majority Perhaps some readers were unaware such voices existed before they read that poem in the newspaper. Or they discounted the possibility that poetry could be found in other voices, discounted the possibility that such voices had anything to do with them.

You can’t even measure Hughes’ influence, in this regard.

Many white writers/editors rejected Hughes, but more supported Hughes, financially to be sure, but mostly championing him and publishing him in “their” magazines. Being published in mainstream white publications this was a strike against Hughes in certain radical Black quarters (especially once the more radical political 1950s and 60s rolled around. Hughes was a beloved but divisive figure, simultaneously, a testament to his stature and influence. His poems still crackle with anger, beauty, longing, certainty. Hell, I felt it when I first read his poems in 9th grade English class. It’s impossible NOT to get it, even if you don’t know the context or background. He lays it all out. The language itself is a wildly bucking electrical wire, sparking across the landscape, illuminating what was in darkness (at least to the larger world outside Black experience, and certainly in literary circles dominated by white people). His language lives. Still.

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Like Chaucer, like Robert Burns, like Seamus Heaney, like Derek Wolcott (and etc.) Hughes made the cultural space larger, he expanded the world, creating room for voices not heard before in poetry.

Now, of course, Langston Hughes seems inevitable. But he wasn’t. It’s not just WHAT he had to say. Form matters.

I cannot count how many times I reference a couple of his most famous poems in my head in everyday life, the same way I do with Auden, Yeats, Keats. His poems become a PART of you.

THEME FOR ENGLISH B

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

I, Too, Sing America

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

QUOTES:

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet–not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America–this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

Countee Cullen, review of The Weary Blues (1926):

[I doubt whether jazz and blues] belong to that dignified company, that select and austere circle of high literary expression which we call poetry.

Melvin Tolson, on Cullen and Langston Hughes, “antipodes” of the Harlem Renaissance movement:

The former is a classicist and conservative; the latter, an experimentalist and radical.

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Jazzonia”:

Langston Hughes’ “Jazzonia,” published in a magazine in 1923 (a year after The Waste Land), is an ode, luminous and rhapsodic. Racial injustice and economic struggle, themes normally prominent in Hughes’s writing, aren’t felt here. But “Jazzonia” remains oppositional nonetheless through its celebration of a taboo-breaking counter-culture, seen in the process of giving birth to a revolutionary mode of art making.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Attending high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he read widely in philosophy and literature. Early in his career, he was influenced by the free verse poetry of Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Amy Lowell, but especially by the writings of Walt Whitman and his modern industrial precursor, Carl Sandburg. Claude McKay’s politically engaged poetry and Alain Locke’s concept of the self-confident and unshackled “New Negro” also had an impact, as did the writings of such early civil rights leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.

Lindsay Patterson:

Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes’ poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes … was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll.

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea:

Fine Clothes to the Jew was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES’ BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as ‘the poet low- rate of Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. … The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

During the Harlem Renaissance, which centered on the vital musical culture, the novelists wrote some powerful, though conventional novels that included dialogue, but the narrative was generally in a standard form. What Langston Hughes set out to do was to use the cadences, the natural metaphors and dialect elements as the primary material for his verse and for his famous Jesse B. Semple letters. “Speak that I may see thee,” said Ben Jonson. In Hughes’s work a whole community is made visible.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Hughes’s poems are linguistically and formally hybrid, straddling high culture and low, black and white, oral and literary, vernacular and Standard English. “The Weary Blues” intermixes features of the blues (lines repeated and varied, or “worried”; syncopated rhythms, call-and-response interjections; melancholy tonality; a final triple rhyme; vernacular idiom) and of Euro-American forms (couplets, iambic pentameter, embedded song, Standard English).

Hoyt W. Fuller:

[Hughes] chose to identify with plain black people … precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet’s reaction to his father’s flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Jazzonia”:

Like Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge at dawn, Hughes is overwhelmed by a complex spectacle for which he struggles to find words. The poem proceeds by bursts of sensation and emotion that sweep us into its world. Structurally, it alternates between mystic invocation and dramatic description, divided by three sets of exclamatory couplets. The jazz is played but not described, the poem functioning instead, through mood and syncopation, as a transposition of the music.

Langston Hughes, review of W.C. Handy’s Blues anthology (1926):

Whereas the Spirituals are always concerned with escape from this world, faith, hope, and a certain ‘joy in the Lord,’ the Blues are very much of the earth, dirty with pain and lazy with the weariness of life … The folk Blues are a long ways removed from the expectancy and faith of the Spirituals. Their hopeless weariness mixed with an absurdly incongruous laughter makes them the most interesting folk songs I have heard.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Hughes’s major formal innovation was to adapt for poetry the rhythm and rhymes, the rhetoric and gritty humor of the blues, as well as other music-based genres such as jazz and spirituals. His first two volumes, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), hybridized the blues with resources gleaned from Whitman, Sandburg and other Euro-American poets. His later book Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), assimilated into poetry the fast-paced, dissonant style of jazz called bebop: “Listen closely: / You’ll hear their feet / Beating out and beating out a– / You think / It’s a happy beat?”

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Jazzonia”:

Hughes (here and elsewhere) insists that jazz is a vehicle of ideas and that it must be taken as seriously as European classical music, the genre of a long-haired elite. His jazzers are “long-headed” because they also have a long memory, as they draw from a repository of melody, rhythm, and phrasing to improvise, embellish, and advance the art form. Finally, “long-headed” may be a visual motif: the dynamite musicians are in a blur of motion, like double exposures in an action photo or like streaks in a streamlined Futurist painting.

David Littlejohn, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes:

On the whole, Hughes’ creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso’s, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if ‘different views engage’ us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it’s over. … Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do.

Langston Hughes:

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear “that woman,” Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs. And many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred. “We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don’t believe in ‘shouting.’ Let’s be dull like the Nordics,” they say, in effect.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

In traveling abroad, Hughes met, befriended, and influenced Caribbean and African writers, who testified to his importance as a model for Negritude, the francophone movement affirming black identity. His major achievements–rooting black literature in African American music–has been a foundation for African American poets of later generations, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Amiri Baraka.

Michael Schmidt:

Time has moved on, and Hughes’s poems of protest, while they are still resonant, belong, as much protest poetry does, primarily to their moment in history. What makes them durable is their voice.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Hughes incorporated the first blues songs he heard as a boy into the title poem of his first book, “The Weary Blues,” and he started writing blues poems soon after the first blues recordings were made, having learned from live and recorded performances by Ma Rainey, “Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Mamie, Clara and Bessie Smith and others who never got to be famous” (Hughes quoted by Nat Hentoff, Mayfair, 1958).

Langston Hughes:

[The blues’s] mountainous melancholy … almost terrible at times.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Like his Euro-American contemporaries, Hughes was expanding the scope of language and materials that could be included in poetry, but whereas the Euro-modernists tended to satirize popular speech and forms, Hughes more often honored, developed, and refined them.

Langston Hughes, “Note on Blues”:

[My poems] are written after the manner [of] Negro folk songs… The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.

 
 
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