Harlem By Langston Hughes Essay

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes has written a multitude of poems such as “Dream Deferred” published in 1951 and “The Weary Blues” in 1925. His poem “Harlem,” has been said that it has a spotlight on the surroundings of people whose dreams have been unnoticed, postponed, or even forgotten in post-World War II Harlem. Hughes believed most of his work was “to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America.” (“Harlem”). As a result, Hughes earned the title of “the poet laureate of Harlem.” Hughes' poem “Harlem,” creates questions like “What even happens to a Dream Deferred?” He clarifies that the poem draws a range of decay and waste to represent the fate of the dream. Although the end of his poem advises when anguish is spreading, it may

Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri and is the son of James N. Hughes and Carrie M Langston who soon split after their son’s birth. When his grandmother died in 1910, Hughes lived with family friends and various relatives in Kansas. In 1915, he moved in with his mother and new stepfather in Illinois where he went to grammar school, but shortly moved to Cleveland Ohio and attended Central High School, excelling in academics and sports. He wrote poetry and short story fiction for the Belfry Owl, his high school’s magazine, and edited the school yearbook. In 1920, he visited his father in Mexico and stayed for about a year. He realized it was not the best environment so he came home in 1921 and attended Columbia University for a year before deciding to drop out. A few months later, he began looking for work and earned a job working as a cabin boy on a merchant ship, while getting to visit Africa, and also

With that, the various lines with stressed lengths and meters create a jagged, anxious sense of energy that restructures the poem’s themes of increasing anger. In his introduction to Montage, Hughes explains that he exhibited his poetry’s rhythms in a musical form with examples like “jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and bebop.” He explains “like these musical genres, the volume is marked by discordant differences, abrupt nuances, and cutting and indelicate interjections, fragmented rhythms and passages… in the manner of a jam session.” In his poem, “Dream Deferred,” several lines rhyme, but do not consist of any patterns of rhyme. Rhymes transpire in lines 3 and 5 (sun & run), 6 and 8, (meat & sweet), and 10 and 11, (load & explode). Hughes may use these certain rhymes to emphasize the irregular rhythm of the poem or to draw attention to the connections of these types of ideas such as “load” and