Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Poetry
- The Cambridge History of American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings: Poetry before 1800
- Part II A New Nation: Poetry from 1800 to 1900
- Part III Forms of Modernism, 1900–1950
- Chapter 22 The Twentieth Century Begins
- Chapter 23 Robert Frost and Tradition
- Chapter 24 T. S. Eliot
- Chapter 25 William Carlos Williams
- Chapter 26 Finding “Only Words” Mysterious
- Chapter 27 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page
- Chapter 28 The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan
- Chapter 29 The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
- Chapter 30 Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists
- Chapter 31 Langston Hughes and His World
- Chapter 32 The Objectivists and the Left
- Chapter 33 “All the Blessings of This Consuming Chance”
- Chapter 34 Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling
- Chapter 35 Writing the South
- Part IV Beyond Modernism: American Poetry, 1950–2000
- Selected Bibliographies
- Index
Chapter 31 - Langston Hughes and His World
from Part III - Forms of Modernism, 1900–1950
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Poetry
- The Cambridge History of American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings: Poetry before 1800
- Part II A New Nation: Poetry from 1800 to 1900
- Part III Forms of Modernism, 1900–1950
- Chapter 22 The Twentieth Century Begins
- Chapter 23 Robert Frost and Tradition
- Chapter 24 T. S. Eliot
- Chapter 25 William Carlos Williams
- Chapter 26 Finding “Only Words” Mysterious
- Chapter 27 Marianne Moore and the Printed Page
- Chapter 28 The Formalist Modernism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Helene Johnson, and Louise Bogan
- Chapter 29 The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
- Chapter 30 Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists
- Chapter 31 Langston Hughes and His World
- Chapter 32 The Objectivists and the Left
- Chapter 33 “All the Blessings of This Consuming Chance”
- Chapter 34 Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling
- Chapter 35 Writing the South
- Part IV Beyond Modernism: American Poetry, 1950–2000
- Selected Bibliographies
- Index
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.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Poetry , pp. 701 - 727Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014