Langston Hughes Let Usa Be America Again Literary Devices

Throughout his poem Let America Be America Again, Langston Hughes uses many literary devices such as extended metaphors, repetition and rhyme to emphasize the various emotions he associates with America. He begins with “let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.” (1-2) and goes on to say “O, let my land be a land where Liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, but opportunity is real, and life is free, equality is in the air we breathe. (There’s never been equality for me, nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’.)” (11-16) There has always been a correlation between America and adjectives like “free” or “brave”, phrases like “the land of opportunity”, though in his writing Hughes crushes the propaganda with an illustration of what it truly was like to live in the New World. To face the reality of slavery and the oppression of a people. In describing what America was in actuality he simultaneously illustrates for his readers a mental image of what he imagined America would be. You are able to see Hughes’ attachment to what he called “our most basic dream”.

He takes the thought that this American dream might not have been all he imagined, but does build up a sense of empowerment towards the ending. “O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath--America will be!” (36-40) As opposed to the beginning of the poem where he felt out of place in his own homeland. In many of these lines his language evokes a sensory mental image that allows the reader to assume what he had felt in writing this. He agrees that yes, America never was America to be yet follows it up with a acclamation of hope for what it could be when the future is nigh. He approaches the negative stance many people had taken against minorities and reconstructs it into a call to action, to better our nation by bettering