Hughe Hughes Poetry During The Harlem Renaissance

Not only was literature rising during the Harlem Renaissance, but so was music. Jazz and blues had peaked in the 1920’s. Hughes was devoted to black music and based a lot of his writings off blues and jazz allowed him to experiment in rhythmic free verse. He attracted a lot of attention after publishing his two books The Weary Blues, 1926, and Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927. Both of these novels emphasized on the lower class black life that ultimately angered a lot of people, saying that it put out a bad image of blacks during this time. But Hughes wasn’t using this to bash the blacks, he was using it to make people aware. He used black dialect, mixed with his rhythm of the blues in a way to present the emotional scenery of the urban black community. He loved the street life of the Harlem neighborhoods, and often he wrote people he met into his works. He wasn’t just speaking as himself anymore, he was speaking as his mother, as the weary man who lived on Lenox Avenue, he spoke as the house servant, he spoke as a brother, and he spoke as the Negro community.

In his 1926 novel titled The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, he wrote “We younger Negro artist 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…We stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” He embraced the black community and tried to empower them by celebrating all tones of black. Not only was it not ok for whites to break down blacks, but it was also not ok for the blacks to break down other blacks. By celebrating all tones he resurrected the word ‘black’ as a beautiful word as opposed to a dark, deceptive, and negative word. His use of color imagery was able to show the ethnic differences of all black