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Pursuing A Dream In Harlem By Langston Hughes

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The theme that I want to write about is the theme of not pursuing a dream. This theme is seen through the poem, Harlem: A dream deferred. The words being used by the speaker in Langston Hughes poem are able to describe this theme. Throughout the poem, the speaker asks rhetorical questions in which pertain to the title of the poem. It connects to the theme of not pushing a dream because as more questions come the more you get to these effects of what happens when a dream is not pursued. In the poem, the speaker says, “Does it stink like rotten meat?”(line 6). The speaker says this in order to make the reader think about what happens to the dream. It's no longer pursuable in a way. The dream is going away and soon it won't be good enough to chase
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The poem that I chose was Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes I chose this poem because it’s a very confusing and very difficult to understand but if you treat it like a puzzle and take the small parts and put them together and understand what they mean you put the whole picture together. The theme of Dream Deferred was the limitations that African Americans had at the time to come and have the so-called “American Dream”. A simile in the text would be “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun”The author uses this to help his theme by stating that the raisin will become smaller and smaller but it won't disappear. Another part of the poem that contributes is“fester like a sore and the run” this means rejected dream almost physically painful and gets infected and becomes a gross reminder. Finally, the last piece of evidence I could find is “or does it explode” this means that everything is gone and the dream is blown to bits”.

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Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book ' that

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In his poem, A Dream Deferred, also known as Harlem, Hughes uses a single metaphor to clinch the end of the poem together. " Or does it explode?" This simple metaphor really evokes emotion and thoughts in every reader.

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