One of the most important literary figure was Langston Hughes. When the “Harlem Renaissance” became popular, Langston Hughes’ influences, style of writing, and themes made him different than the others. Langston Hughes was influenced by people and events. The people that influenced him were Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman.
The Impact of the Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and cultural movement during the 1920s and the 1930s. It was sparked by a migration of nearly one million African-Americans who moved to the prospering north to escape the heavy racism in the south and to partake in a better future with better tolerance. Magazines and newspapers owned by African-Americans flourished, poets and music artists rose to their feet. An inspiration swept the people up and gave them confidence.
Langston Hughes was a very famous poet but also a dreamer during the 1920s when discrimination and racism were main problems in the society. He was a civil right activist who proposed the idea of equal opportunities between all races by writing poems, books, and playwrights; many of his famous literatures affected Americans in many crucial ways. Hughes’s main idea against the society was equality however he discovered that it is difficult to change people’s “norms” and stereotypes. Therefore, his humorous and serious type of writing effectively appealed to many audiences which eventually played a big role of achieving racial equality and equal opportunities.
Throughout much of his poetry, Langston Hughes wrestles with complex notations of African American dreams, racism, and discrimination during the Harlem Renaissance. Through various poems, Hughes uses rhetorical devices to state his point of view. He tends to use metaphors, similes, imagery, and connotation abundantly to illustrate in what he strongly believes. Discrimination and racism were very popular during the time when Langston Hughes began to develop and publish his poems, so therefore his poems are mostly based on racism and discrimination, and the desire of an African American to live the American dream. Langston Hughes poems served as a voice for all African Americans greatly throughout his living life, and even after his death.
Langston Hughes wrote politically challenging poems about the government. In “Let America Be America Again” brings people to the attention that African Americans never got the treatment they deserved. Hughes realizes that “there's never been equality for him” (Hughes 1) in America. Hughes, who traveled across the country, realized that racism appeared everywhere. During the Harlem Renaissance, his poetry “condemns white oppression” (Gohar 1) and encourages “racial pride”
A warning from Langston Hughes echoes through time: "Negroes,/ Sweet and docile,/ Meek, humble and kind:/ Beware the day/ They change their mind!" (Warning 1-5). In a time when African Americans were looked down upon throughout the country, Langston Hughes rose above. He experienced the discrimination and soon led the revolution.
The culture of most blacks was unwanted during this time. For this reason Hughes desired to make a change and illustrate such cultural identities in his poems. In doing this he caused a shift in ideas among all people. Although the change didn’t happen immediately it did eventually occur. With that said the African American people were given less of an opportunity at jobs, schooling, and most importantly culture.
In conclusion, Langston Hughes’s essay certainly compels the reader to contemplate
Langston Hughes was a poet that often mentioned the lives of African-Americans that lived in the South in his poems. In the book Blackness and the Adventure of Western Civilization by George Kent , it was said that "[d]espite the difficulties, Langston Hughes chose to build his vision on the basis of the folk experience as it
Through his poetry, he depicted the African American experience in a country that was still very segregated and race oriented. He drew attention to the joys and struggles the African American life entailed. His work was not only incredibly influential at the time but had a huge impact on the decades that were to come. Langston Hughes’ poems and writings contributed directly to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in which thousands of protests were mounted with the goal to end legalized racial segregation and discrimination laws in the United States. His poem “Harlem” which will be analyzed below, inspired Martin Luther King, one of the most influential voices and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement to give his speech “I Have a Dream."
Over the course of history, America has struggled with adversity and soared with prosperity. From the Great Depression to the first man on the moon, the United States has experienced it all. A crucial event in America’s history that does not receive the recognition that it should is the Harlem Renaissance. Prominent from the “Roaring Twenties” until the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of African American cultural pride, particularly in the creative arts (Hutchinson 2015). Not only was African American culture reborn, but American culture as a whole (“The Harlem Renaissance” 2015).
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.
Langston Hughes’ Harlem is a timeless lyrical poem. It is designed to evoke emotion from the reader using Hughes lived experiences, wherein he conveys them with simplicity. Hughes’ role in the Harlem renaissance enabled him to write this poem; it is a poem that can be used as a primary source for how black enlightenment in Harlem came about. It also tells the story of what happens to an oppressed people who has their “dreams deferred.” The words make up the imagarey and the imagery makes up the symbolism meant to pierce the reader’s attention.
The poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes is one of my favorite poems. The poem was written in 1951. The reason why it is my favorite poem is because it was written during the beginning of the civil rights movement and it reflects the hardships that many Africans Americans were facing during that time period. The language of “Harlem” is very down to earth. The narrator asks whether a dream becomes a “dried up fruit, or a sweet that crusts and sugar over, and he also asks whether the dream sags or explodes.
Langston Hughes was a great writer and poet who displayed determination in his poems to try and inspire people. Great authors like Langston Hughes use the power of language when they want to connect with people to try and understand their thoughts and ideas. In Hughes's poems, he includes a lot of sensory details and imagery to try and give the people a real idea of what he was going through. He faces hard obstacles to try and accomplish his dreams that start to slowly fade away. Hughes skillfully uses the power of imagery, diction, and syntax to create and shape meaning in his reflective poem “As I Grew Older.”
