Chapter 31 - Langston Hughes and His World

Summary

This chapter surveys the poet Langston Hughes in the context of his many worldly links. It proposes four frameworks through which Hughes and his many diverse works, especially his poems, can productively be viewed, the bardic-demotic, left-internationalist/Afro-planetary, professional and sublimated-closeted frameworks. His 1900 poem Lift Every Voice and Sing, later set to music by his brother, the composer John Rosamond Johnson, is known to this day as the Negro national anthem. Hughes also added to African American poetry's long standing confrontation with the rural South by unflinchingly addressing the formerly taboo topic of race mixing, as in this wrenching triply voiced excerpt from his 1927 mulatto. Hughes's 1930s poetry is indissoluble from his linkages to the American and international left. Hughes translated, notably recasting Roumain's peasant novel Masters of the Dew into U.S. southern rural speech.