Langston Hughes
While both Claude McKay and Langston Hughes celebrate black culture and how they each identify with this population, Hughes’ tone suggests a greater sense of comfort with his heritage. Ramazani notes, “Hughes took as his primary muses the trenchant humor, musical genius, and oral poetry of the black urban poor and working class” (684). By veering away from the Western techniques and motifs McKay employs, Hughes relies greatly on his peoples’ music and its popular vernacular to speak to the societal battles African Americans fought within themselves and Western outside culture.
Although Ramazani argues that Hughes will characteristically battle the “combination of participation and detachment” throughout his life, it is the blend of both his black participation and white detachment that in fact creates a new Negro tradition and thusly an American one. Hughes’ poem, “Cross” is indicative of the struggle Ramazani mentions, however instead of damning one tradition to the other, he simply questions his place in society, seeing how it is a fairly unique one as he is “neither white nor black” (12).
Hughes’ style of poetry is more freeing in terms of form and verse. Instead of simply offering African customs, Hughes overturns black negative stereotypes giving them dignity and illustrates a love of those traditions outside of Western “whiteness”. In “When Sue Wears Red,” Susanna Jones wears red and reminds Hughes of “a queen from some…Egyptian night” assigning complimentary virtues, not negative images. Instead of frequent imagery associated with lynching and slavery, Hughes employs descriptions that celebrate a rich history and oldness as a badge of honor, not a decrepit state. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” asserts a trans historical grandeur utilizing rivers as a cleansing agent where the speaker has “bathed,” “built,” and “sung” all over the world throughout the centuries versus being whipped, hung, and worked until death. Hughes is the first poet to explore black as being beautiful or treated the same as being white. Hughes explores love and life – the good and bad and the “black an’ ugly” in “Gal’s Cry for a Dying Lover” – within the African American culture instead of outside peering in (15).
Modernist depiction of Langston Hughes