Langston Hughes, Thesis Paper Example

The Harlem Renaissance is the period of cultural thriving among the intellectual African-American population in the United States of America. This thriving of the “negro literature” took place in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s through the Great Depression and through the 1930s. James Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, short-story writer and playwright of this period. He was one of the innovators of jazz poetry and was particularly known for characterizing and portraying the lives of African-American population through the 1820s till 1860s. He was born February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He began writing poetry in Lincoln, Illinois and finished college education in Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. Through his youth life he traveled to Mexico, Africa, and Europe.

One of the brightest poems of Langston Hughes describing the unfairness of not just the lives of African-Americans, but also the lives of all discriminated citizens whether they are immigrants, Native Americans or just poor people is in “Let America Be America Again”. Langston Hughes portrays how the capitalist mentality, the society and the governance of USA in those days where social minorities were like: “…live like leeches on the people’s lives…” (22). The meaning in “Let America Be America Again” is that the author hopes on the better future of America, and truly believes that social equity will be someday. He wishes to live in the America, where it was once promised to be a land of the free. Hughes’ poems are as if emotions, they differ. For example, “Dream Variations” portray an enlightened mood of Langston Hughes, where he dreamingly thinks of pleasant feelings. However even in such poems he cues the social problem of those days: “…Night coming tenderly. Black like me.” (16). The meaning and message behind this poem is that Langston Hughes wishes and dreams of the day when black and white people would freely and peacefully as if ordinarily interact and communicate with each other. I chose these particular poems because they seamed to be so different in styles from each other, and yet the message was similar in them. Langston Hughes even in such a short poem like “Dream Variations” maintained to follow his main goal in pursuing the most important to him social problem in the US.

Works Cited

Hughes, Langston. “Dream Variations.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994.

Hughes, Langston. “Let America Be America Again.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994.