I’ve always been familiar with Langston Hughes’ work, but reading him after Whitman has been a very eye-opening experience. His reactions to Whitman as a poet, an American, and a human being are complex due to the ways in which he applies his own personal experience and views in the work. In “I,Too” we read the words of a man who believed in the potential of the future for not only himself but the rest of America. I see similarities to Whitman in this poem due to the ways in which Hughes’ confidently asserts himself and the way in which he creates a powerful identity. Despite the similarities, I also see this poem as a response to Whitman that expresses the fact the fact that Whitman and Hughes’ are different. America during this time was in a difficult and problematic state, and Hughes’ asserts that his experience as American is different than Whitmans. Despite this, it also creates a sort of unity through the idea of them both being American. This poem comes from a much different place.
The first lines of this poem reminds me of Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric”, a poem that celebrates the body and its potential in this world. The first couple of lines read, “I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul…” (PoetryFoundation.org). The opening stanza of this poem expresses an idea of celebrating ones body and interacting with others who will accept and embrace that body. Whitman expresses the idea that his body is beautiful and that it also has the potential to “charge” the others. In Hughes’ poem we see a different approach to the body. We read, “I, too, sing America, I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, and eat well, And grow strong…”(PoetryFoundation.org). In these lines, Hughe’s knows the worth of himself but the others don’t treat him with the same amount of love and respect that we see in Whitman’s poem. Due to his race, he is outcasted but he still sees the beauty in his body and he does not let that ignorance and lack of love deter him. Like Whitman, Hughes’ sees that his body is beautiful, but he expresses his experiences with racism and hatred.
The final part of the poem also reminds me of some of the ways in which Whitman wrote. Hughe’s writes of a future that he sees, and it is a future where his body is respected and loved. We read, “Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen,’ Then…” (PoetryFoundation.org). This part of the poem shows how Hughes’ spoke of an America that respected all. Whitman wrote about America as a place where all had the potential to be something great, but he wrote those words from the position of a white man. For Hughes’, we see that he poetically expresses the beauty of the body but his experience was much different than Whitman’s. This poem is beautiful to me because despite the hatred and negativity that Hughes’ saw, he still believed in not only American potential, but also human potential. He writes, “…They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed- I, too, am America” (PoetryFoundation.org). Hughes’, like Whitman, writes about a human and Amercan potential that he believes will come, and it’s a vision where all are accepted and respected.
I like how you balance Hughes much clearer reflection of oppression and racism against Whitman’s optimism, even as a sense of deferred progress hold these two poets together. We discussed in class a few ways that Hughes registers his distance from Whitman, one being his frequent and often jarring enjambments as he breaks the flow of syntax. Whitman, we know, almost never broke a line unless there was a clear syntactical break, a clear moment for a “breach” after what were usually long, chanting lines. Do you think Hughes was using his own poetic form to critique that open optimism, and to demonstrate the deferral of this dream of equality? Another thing I noticed while re-reading this poem in light of your post is the strange way in which Hughes triangulates the relationship to include not just the victim of racism and his the perpetrator, but also “company.” This also aligns with the sense of “shame” that Hughes casts on his antagonist: before the eyes of equality, of a Whitmanian spirit, and and a quickly evolving humanity, the backwardness of racial prejudice will be a source of shame.
In my blog post for this past weekend, I wrote on the Post-Whitman world and how poems by people like Garcia Lorca and Calvin Hernton show that the world we live in now is in a depressed state compared to Whitman’s “America”. They yearn for Whitman’s world and to be free from the machines and chains of their present. There is a helplessness and lack of hope in their vision. Although he his channeling his negative experiences with race and lack of equality in his life, I feel as though Hughes presents a more hopeful vision for his “America” unlike Lorca or Hernton. Hughes sees the ills of his society but still believes in his identity as an American and knows that someday he, and many others like him, will “be at the table When company comes” and will have the world that Whitman was so inspired by.
When we first learned that Langston Hughes was a supporter of Whitman and a big fan of his work, I was admittedly surprised. Like we discussed in class and also saw in Lavelle Porter’s article “Should Walt Whitman be #Cancelled?”, Whitman was a proponer of some pretty weird racist pseudo science and held other beliefs that we would today call problematic about race. Since Hughes is one of the primary poets we learn about in school that celebrates his blackness, him being a fan of Whitman did not add up to me. But considering his “I, Too” in conversations with Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” and other poetry, they have much more in common than it seems on the surface. Like you point out, they both seem to have an unwavering hope in a better America. Each poet is quintessentially American, and though they undoubtedly experienced America in different ways, they seem to share the same vision for it—equality; a place that celebrates man as he is. Thanks for tying these poets together in a way that makes sense to me; reading one in context with the other makes for a richer reading now.