“Harlem” and “Echoes of the Jazz Age” both provides details about the 20s and how it was a time of self-expression. In Harlem, Hughes talks about “dream deferred.” During this time, due to major racial inequality, the black youth was limited and were not able to express themselves. They were delayed and had to wait to gain recognition for their art, and as people. As a black poet, Langston Hughes understands this and uses his experiences to write about his dreams for equality. He intensifies the situation in a dark manner by describing a dream as something that “dries up,” “festers,” and “stink like rotten meat.” The final line of the poem as another rhetorical question, “Or does it explode?” Here, the explosion could be what was kept inside