Langston Hughes Essay examples -- essays research papers

The period of the Harlem reincarnation was a time of grand change and exploration for African Americans . It was during this render in the early twentieth century that African Americans were exploring their cultural and affectionate roots. With the rapid expansion of a cohesive saturnine community in the area, it was only a matter of time before the finest minds in corrosive America converged to share their ideas and unleash their creative mettles upon a country that had for so long silenced them. In the midst of this bohemian convergence, cosmosy another(prenominal) worthy figures arose who would give a new utterance to African Americans. With such great notables as Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale, and James Johnson, mainstream American now had a droll window into the plight of African Americans all over the country. One man-to-man though stands out as one of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes define himself by his ability to pursue the true essence of black mob at a time when black identity, culture, or art was considered an oxymoronic concept. Hughes sought-after(a) to explore the true identity of Black America even amidst unfavorable judgment that his work was anti-assimilationist in its literary expression. Wallace Thurman, one of Hughes closest friends had this to say somewhat the poets subject matterHe went for inspiration and rhythms to those people who had been the leastabsorbed by the quagmire of American Kultur, and from them he undertookto select and carry on such autonomous racial values as were being speedilyeradicated in order to speed the Negros assimilation. ( Bloom 161)To many black critics, including Thurman, the subjects of Langston Hughes poetry exposed an aspect of the black culture that, agree to Countee Cullen threw wide, every door of the racial entourage, to the wholesale gaze of the world at large (Bloom 152). Hughes was a lover of his people and sought to explain and st raighten the Negro condition in America. He created works of literature that were distinctively Negro in their elementsWithout repudiating the Americanness of the Afro American, he defined how a work of art by a black American can be Negro, the artisans Americanness notwithstanding..The black artist stands a good dislodge of capturing the Negro soul if he looks for his material not among the self-styled hi-class Negroes, just now among the low down folks, the ... ...gston Hughes manifested itself in The Weary Blues. Hughes wrote the verse form to be played to music and it was performed with an accompaniment of jazz in the background. The flux of the poem is in tune to a blues beat. It incorporates the slow disappear mood of the blues and its easy free flow of thought. The poem captures the essence of sadness and melancholy that is attributed to the blues. Hughes writes about observing a piano worker as he plays the sweet blues in the nightHe played that sad raggy tune like a musical markSweet bluesComing from a black mans soul.O Blues               (Norton 1733)The Weary Blues captures an important element of the black identity, that of its music and the soul which is put into its expression. The poem captures that soul of the black man as he wails a mellow tune to the beat of a blues rhythm. Langston Hughes established himself as the poet laureate of Harlem. He served as the voice of the downtrodden, as well the elite in black culture. The criticism that he once received is now praise as his influence is manifested in the affirmation of the black identity.