(Analytical Essay Comparing Hughes, Clifton, McElroy) Comparisons can be made between anyone or anything. This becomes especially true when comparing authors. Langston Hughes emerged in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote from a of darkness based on his childhood. Lucille Clifton met writers who influenced and encouraged her work. Colleen McElroy spent much of her youth on the move. She began to write and teach to tell her stories. The explorations of cultural heritage in the poems by Hughes, Clifton, and McElroy can be compared and contrasted in many different ways. The first comparison and contrast of the explorations of cultural heritage is between Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton. In Clifton’s poem “Study the Masters”, she tells about workers who watch their masters do the things she dreamed of doing.Clifton states in line 1, “Study the masters like my aunt timmie. It was her iron or one like hers, that smoothed the sheets the master poet slept on.” This idea in also seen in Hughes’s “Dream Variation”. Hughes states in line 5, “Then rest cool evening beneath a tall tree while night comes on gently, dark like me. That is my dream!” These oppressed people had only their dreams to cling to. …show more content…
In McElroy’s poem “For my Children”, she talks about giving a better life to her children and the future. McElroy says on line 14, “My past is a slender dancer reflected briefly like a leopard in fingers of fire. The future of Dahomey is a house of 16 doors.” In Hughes’s poem “I, Too”, this idea is also present. He states on line 8, “Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table when company comes.” The future will be a different place, a better