The Work of Langston Hughes Essay example -- Poetry Langston Hughes Au

The Work of Langston HughesLangston Hughes is considered by many another(prenominal) readers to be the most signifi croupet scandalous poet of the twentieth century. He is expound as ...the beloved author of poems steeped in the richness of African American socialization, poems that exude Hughess affection for black Americans across all divisions of region, class, and gender. (Rampersad 3) His paternity was both depressing and uplifting at clock. His rhyme, b functionning five decades from 1926 to 1967, confered the changing black experience in America, from the Harlem Renaissance to the turbulent sixties. At the beginning of his career, he was surrounded by the Harlem Renaissance. New York City in the 1920s was a place of immense growth and richness in Afro-American culture and art. For Hughes, this was the perfect opportunity to establish his poems. His early work reflects the happy times of the era. However, as time progressed he became increasingly bitter and upset ever yplace race relations. Except for a few examples, all his poems from this later check spoke ab bring out social injustice in America. The somber intuitive feeling of his writing often reflected his mood. Race relations was the shadow of his career, following him from his initial poem to his last. The tone and subject matter of Hughess poetry can be linked to certain points in history, and his life. The youth of Hughes is brought out by his poem Harlem Night monastic order, a piece which describes living in the moment. Often children do not consider the consequences of their actions they act on instinct(predicate) and desire. Hughes might have been 27 when he wrote this poem, but the feisty, upbeat gait of a school boy is present in his style. Harlem Night Club is unique in that it describes the integration of blacks and whites in an optimistic tone. The vigor and timber of his youth is reflected in the energy of the writing, Jazz-band, jazz-band, / Play, plAY, PLAY / Tomorrow ....who knows? / Dance today The repeat of the words, and the increasing emphasis on the word play bring out the excitement to the reader. More evidence of Hughess youth comes from the very decoct of the poem the interracial couples. The entire poem can be summed up as ...a single-glance tableau of interracial flirtation against a background of overbold jazz. (Emanuel 120) This festive relationship between the two sexes can rarely be seen in any of Hughess later poems. At th... ... civil rights case had peaked, Hughes is left feeling worthless. The bitterness he faced during his lifetime create up to a dull apathy that appears in this piece. Despite the occurrence that Hughes is ...among the most eloquent American poets to have sung about the wounds caused by injustice (Rampersad 3), he thought his poems made no impact on society. On the contrary, Hughess poems had a tremendous influence on African-American society. Although scholars and critics throughout his career dismissed his poetry as too fair and unlearned, his primary audience, the black masses, and even Hughes himself viewed his work as folk poetry which was beneath criticism. (Rampersad 4-5) His poems, when studied as a collection over the span of his life, clearly show how the tone and emphasis in the writing reflect the mood of Hughes himself as he grew old. The universal theme of racism and race relations defined all the important work of Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes Danny Belinkie December 23, 1999 catamenia 2 Works Cited Emanuel, James. Langston Hughes. Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1967. Arnold Rampersad. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics, New York, 1994.