FREE ESSAY ON LANGSTON HUGHES: A POET SUPREME

LANGSTON HUGHES: A POET SUPREME

Langston Hughes: A Poet Supreme
Black poetry is poetry that (1) is grounded in the black experience; (2) utilizes black
music as a structural or emulative model; and (3) consciously transforms the prevailing
standards of poetry through and inconoclastic and innovative use of language.
No poet better carries the mantle of model and innovator the Langston Hughes, the
prolific Duke Ellington of black poetry. Hughes's output alone is staggering. During his
lifetime, he published over eight hundred poems. Moreover, he single-handedly defined
blues poetry and is arguably the first major jazz poet. Early in his career he realized
the importance of reading his poetry to receptive audiences. When Alain Locke arranged a
poetry reading by Hughes before the Playwriter's Circle in 1972 in Washington, a blues
pianist accompanied him, bringing Hughes the artist and blues music one step closer
together, even though Hughes felt that the piano player was 'too polished.' He suggested
to his Knopf editor that they ought to get 'a regular Lenox Avenue blues boy' to
accompany him at his reading in New York. In the fifties Hughes was a major voice in the
movement of recording with jazz accompaniment.
Although I have neither the space, inclination, or ability to give a close textual
reading of Hughes's poetry and although a large body of critical work already exists, I
would like to focus on one piece by Hughes to evidence my case for his stature. That
piece is the multipart, book-lenght poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951).
In Montage, which Hughes described in a letter to Arna Bontemps as what you might call a
precedent shattering opus-also could be known as a tour de force, Hughes addresses a
number of critical problems facing black poetry: (1) how to affect a modern sensibility
and at the same time maintain a grounding in the folk culture; (2) how to achieve the
textual representation of the music, especially in terms of improvisation and variation
of tone and timbre; and (3) how to use the vernacle without resorting to dialect.
Hughes realized that is was impossible to do what he wanted to do in one piece, so he
composed a series of short poems that play effect off eachother. Western literacy thought
values the long form, the novel in particular, as a statement of intellectual acheivement
and implicity devalues short forms. For this reason a collection of short stories rarely
recieves equal critical attention as does a novel by the same author. In order to make
the long form stand out, the author is expected to demonstrate complexity of plot and
character developement. But these and related concerns are simply a culturally biased
valuation of a specific set of literacy devices, often at the expense of other devices
(many of which center on the sounding of poetry on the page). In a very important sence,
modern American poetry was moving toward painting, that is, a composition of words placed
on a page, and away from music, that is, an articulation of words that have been both
sense (meaning) and sound (emotion). Hughes clearly close to emphasize black music, which
increasingly meant dealing with improvisation.
The improvisation is implied in that certain themes, rhymes and rhythmic patterns, and
recurring images ebb and flow throughout Montage- here spelled out in detail, there
hinted at, and in another instance turned on their head. The above-quoated letter
indicated that Hughes was conscious of what he was doing, and it is this
self-consciousness that marks this as a modern poem. Indeed, Montage is almost postmodern
in its mosaic of voices and attitude contained in one piece.
Just as jazz simultaneously stresses the collective and the individual, Hughes component
poems are each individual statements, but they are also part of a larger unit(y).
Significantly, Hughes as an individual is de-emphasized in the work, even as various
individual members of the community speak and are spoken about. In other words, Hughes
becomes a medium, a sensitive and subtle medium, but a medium nonetheless. In a seemingly
simple form, Hughes serves as a sounding board for the articulation of people who are
usually voiceless.
The work's modernity is the self-reflective nature of all the voiced speaking, and in
speaking, coming to consciouness of themselves and their environment. Time and time again
we hear voices self-consciously grappling with their Harlem realities, which include an
international awareness of African American, West Indian, and African bonding. In the
African American context modernity specifically refers to the post-Reconstruction,
nothern-oriented urbanization of African American life. No presixties black poet was more
complete in expressing the black urban viewpoint than Hughes.
The ease with which Hughes voices the various personalities and points of view belies
both complexity and progressiveness of his achievement. Because of the brevity of the
poems, Hughes's points are often made in passing and require reflection in order to
appreciate just how many short poems that make up the Montage series. This poem perfectly
illustrates Hughes's musical use of bebop rythms and phrasing mated to subtle social
commentary.
Most critics consider Hughes reticent on the subject of homosexuality, yet Montage
includes this double critique-one of homophobia and heterosexism and one of the
criminalization of sexual activities.
Cafe: 3 a.m.
Detective from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody 
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where?
Compare this to the work of any other poet publishing with a major house in the early
1950's.
In the headnote to Montage, Hughes declares, In the terms of current Afro-American
popular music and sources from which it has progressed--jazz, ragtime, swing, blues,
boogie-woogie, and be-bop--this poem on contemporary Harlem, like 
be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes sudden naunces, sharp and impudent
interjections, broken rythems, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session,
sometimes like the popular song, puncuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and distortions of
the music of a community in transition.
Langston Hughes, a poet who had cut his teeth and made his mark as a blues` poet, took up
the challenge of writing book-length bebop jazz peom! Although, just like the music,
there is a bedrock of blues undergirding the jazz structure, Hughes objective and success
was in creating a modern jazz structure that allowed for a broader range of themes,
voices, and even styles. Some of the poems are epigrams, some are written as actual
letters, some are conversations, and others are monologs; more than once we have poems
that amount to sayings, folk definitions, and observations. Indeed, Montage is aptly
named. In the whole history of American literature, no one has written a comparable poem
that bases itself on a music form, and certainly no one has ever come close in the
context of jazz. All other efforts at jazz poetry pale in comparison.
Consider that Hughes does not take the easy way out. He chose not to emphasize the names
of musicians or the names of musical compostions. There is no attempt to imitate the
sound of the horns (as was common in much of the Black Arts music-based poetry). The
mosaic quality of the music, the intensity of expression, the fluid, quicksilver rhythms,
and the complex melodic counterpoint and harmonic daring of bebop are all achieved by a
deft use of simple words, precise punctuation, and italics. The complexity of the overall
composition notwithstanding, the individual parts seem too simple to be true, but Montage
works so sublimely because Hughes figured out precisely how to get to the heart of the
expression without bothering with or getting caught up in external floridness.
The third major achievement of this poem is Hughes's mastery of nuance and control of
language. He suggest the dialect without resorting to the contractions and so-called
broken English that mar(k)s most dialects poetry and some modern poetry by blacks.
Langston Hughes and the Blues, Steven Tracy's detailed reading and explication of
Hughes's blues poetry, more than adequately defines Hughes's consummate poetic artistry.
Tracy pays particular attention to Hughes's subltle use of puncuation, a subtlety that
completey escapes most critics of Hughes's work. Although Tracy does not focus on the
bebop aspects of Montage and does not address Ask Your Mama, this is nevertheless the
best starting point for a literary appreciation of Hughes's use of music in his poetry.
Introducing an analysis of the textual revisions that Hughes made as he combined the
techniques of the blues artist, the blues composer, and the poet, Tracy writes: The
pervasive influence of the oral tradition in Hughes's poetry might make an examination of
Hughes's revisions of his blues peoms seem like a futile, pedantic exercise, particularly
given the variable nature of an individual blues lyric as the singer performs it.
However, because Hughes was a literary artist, because he was tied to the written as well
as the oral tradition, and because he made sometimes drastic revisions of his blues
poems, such an examination helps to reaveal his attitudes toward his material as they
modulate over the years and to illuminate the nature of his use of the oral blues
tradition in his written work.
There is an African proverb used to express futility: like singing to a white man. If one
is unfamiliar with blues culture, how can one hope to appreciate fully or expertly
critique Langston Hughes? The establishment's critical diminishing and dismissing of
Hughes is based, to an astoundingly large degree, on the cultural illiteracy and
unresponsiveness of establishment critics to the blues. In their ignorance they
denigrated what they were both intellectually and emotionally unequipped to understand.
Montage gave us defining metaphors of the black experience--the dream deferred and
raisins in the sun. Only Dunbar's caged bird mataphor comes close, in terms of popular
acceptance, as a cultural image of African American life. As important and innovative as
Montage is, most of us are not fully aware of this book-length accomplishment because we
have bought into the establishment assessment that Hughes had a limited poetic technique.
In a similar way, the establishment assessment assessed Thelonious Monk as having a
limited piano techinique. But just as few pianists are able to play like Monk and no
musicians have to able to match his compositional authority; similarity, emphasis on
Eurocentric poetic devices notwithstanding few poets have been able to write from inside
the black experience like Hughes, and no one has achieved as impressive a body of
compositions, that is textual peoms.
Lanston Hughes was absolutely clear about the focus of his work and the danger inherent
in articulating the history and vision, the realities and aspirations, of the sufferers.
An emphasis on dual responsibilites, social literacy, is in itself a particular feature
of a black aesthetic. This is not new, or novel, but it does continue to be controversial
precisely because it contextualizes art within the world as the world actually is , beset
by dominant and dominating forces who enforce (sometimes under the rubric of free
enterprise) all manners of economic exploitation.
There is necessarily an opposition to commercialism inherent in the black aesthetic
precisely because, from an African American perspective, the birth of the black
experience, as archetypically illustrated by the Congo Suare experience, was
simultaneously the site of both black art as ritual and black art as entertainment, with
the entertainment undermining the rutual. Moreover, the birth of the African American was
as a chattel slave, as a commercial product. If anyone is by birthright opposed to
commericalism, it is certainly the African American.
The advocacy of freedom and fighting against oppression and exploitation is not simply a
question of content but also a question of the use of art. Langston Hughes was keenly
aware of the dichotomy of content and aestetic and also of moral disaster of ignoring the
reality and repercussions of such a dichotomy. Too many people in their literary
criticism completely overlook social context and hence overlook as well the fact that the
social thrust of peotry is intergral to its aestetics.
Langston Hughes, as subtle as he was, and as innocuous as he may seem by today's
standards, is exemplary of a poet grounded in the culture, consistent in his use of music
as both inspiration and model, and innovative and iconoclastic in his use of English.
Yes, it was and continues to be revolutionary to insist on transforming English into a
tool of ritual within the black community and not just a lingua franca of commerce or
individual self-expression.
Finally, another aspect of Hughes's abilites that is also overlooked or ignored is that
he was multilingual and masterfully translated poetry, including seminal work of Nicholas
Gullien and Federico Garcia Lorca. The importance of this observation is that this is
another piece of irrefutable evidence that Hughes's writing style was not reflective of
the limitations of an undisciplined, unsophisticated, and provincial poet.
Much of the criticism of Hughes's poetry by textually influenced academicians would lead
the reader to believe that Hughes was simply a hack writer who had some facility with
musical imagery and styles. Such views who comfortably spoke three languages, translated
literature from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere, and traveled incessantly,
could be thought of as a relitively unsophisticated, even simple poet.
In much the same way the Pulitzer judges refused to award their prize to Duke Ellington
in 1965 because they did not think his work was serious enough, Hughes has been denied
both the appropriate formal awards and informal kudos, as well as significant posthumous
awards from the American literacy establishment. Perhaps there is no suprise here because
the elevation of self-determined blackness, especially outside of sports and
entertainment, is usually greeted by deafening silence from both critical as well as the
popular authorities of the status quo. How else could it be? To achieve blackness is
inherently a liberating act, and liberation is neccessarily disruptive of the status
quo.
From my personal perspective, I feel that not just African American poetry, but poetry in
itself has deep internal impacts on people in general. Self expression, life experiences,
and point-of-views are all expressed in Poetry. As a poet, I hope to make my mark and
contribution to African Americans as Langston Hughes has done for me.