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Poetics

Kathleen Helen Strom

Langston Hughes Remembered

My initial introduction to Langston Hughes came through a poetry appreciation class at Writers Village University. Our course of study included Hughes's first published poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." I was touched by the depth and simplicity of this much loved poem and wanted to discover more about the man and his work. As it turned out, ample opportunity to do so was just around the corner.

Early in the new year, I learned that Langston Hughes had been chosen as the official poet of America, and was to be honoured in a multitude of ways. Beginning in February, through National Poetry Month - April and beyond, his star was destined to rise in a nationwide celebration dedicated to the man, his life, and his poetry. Today, at my fingertips, I have a wealth of information about this extraordinary poet and I'd like to share it with you.

Celebrations for Langston Hughes

For the past seven years The Academy of American Poets have sponsored National Poetry Month during the month of April. This nationwide celebration focuses on the importance of poetry in American culture, and involves business and non-profit organizations. Throughout the month of April, libraries, schools, book stores, coffeehouses, cultural centers and parks will take on a festive springtime air, as poetry blooms in the heart of community life, through performances, festivals, readings, workshops and symposiums. This year, Langston Hughes, was selected as the premier poet for his outstanding contribution to American poetry, to African-American culture, and the celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

In light of this, Langston Hughes will be the sole focus of the Academy of American Poets’ national advertising campaign. Each April, the Academy creates almost 200,000 National Poetry Month posters that are freely distributed to U.S. schools, libraries, bookstores, and community centers to help promote their month-long celebration and to increase poetry awareness.

In addition, the Academy is partnering with the Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, based at the University of Kansas, and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to sponsor a number of special events, including a Langston Hughes Poetry Day on April 2, 2002. On that day, millions of people across America will gather in reading groups to enjoy and discuss his poetry. Even though this article will not be published until after the event, I encourage you to visit the following web site for a reading guide. It's not too late to form a reading group of your own in April. This is a wonderfully detailed site, dedicated to "Reading and Remembering Langston Hughes". Here you will find something for both the heart and mind. A reading group guide is available at here.

On April 30, the PEN American Center and the Academy will co-sponsor a tribute to Hughes at Town Hall, New York, NY. This "Twentieth- Century Masters Tribute To Langston Hughes" will feature Arnold Rampersad, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Sonia Sanchez, and Willie Perdomo. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster 212-307-4100. These two Langston Hughes celebrations will serve as the alpha and omega to a month committed to celebrating the achievements of American poets, and to making poetry more accessible to the public.

In a campaign to recognize American poets on U. S. postage stamps, the Academy of American Poets participated by offering the public an online vote during March and April, 2001. The Academy invited the public to cast ballots for their favourite American poets at their web site. More than 10,000 people did so. In all 205 poets were nominated for future stamps, but the people's number one choice for 2002 was Langston Hughes with a vote of 2,294. First runner-up was Sylvia Plath with 597 votes.

On the poet's centennial birthday, February 1, 2002, the United States Postal Service issued a Langston Hughes stamp as part of its Black Heritage series. The 34-cent, first-class stamp features a black and white photograph of a Hughes as a young man in New York City. It is the 25th stamp in the Post Office's Black Heritage series. To mark the occasion, a ceremony was held in Harlem, New York City, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. On the same day, the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington, D. C. opened an exhibit on his life and work that will extend through August 2, 2002.

A great many other Hughes centennial celebrations have already taken place throughout the month of February. Official functions in his boyhood hometown of Lawrence, Kansas included a three-day symposium of scholars, poets, and performance artists who explored themes relating to Hughes' life, work, and broad influence. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided a grant to the University of Kansas for the Langston Hughes National Poetry Project. The grant supported the public activities, online resources, and print materials on Langston Hughes and American poetry, including this symposium. The project will promote reading, listening, and appreciating poetry in the United States and abroad through poetry circles. For information or to sponsor a poetry circle, write Alison Watkins, Langston Hughes Poetry Project, Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045; e-mail awatkins@ku.edu or phone 785-864-7836.

In all of this it is clearly evident that Langston Hughes has touched the hearts of the people as much as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, poets he admired, and whose work influenced his own. And obvious, too, that Hughes has reached a pinnacle of success that is reserved for the great ones.

What is it, I wondered, that sets one poet apart from another? What is it about this poet's life and personality that enabled him to write poems that are more than pretty words on paper? And how is it that his heartfelt, searching words draw us back, time and again, to savour the bittersweet riches hidden there? Who is this man? Why has he risen to the top? And what can students of poetry learn from him?

The Life and Times of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, a black boy, in a black community, in a white man's world. Segregation of black and white was still a painfully inflicted standard in the South. Soon after his birth, his father abandoned the family and left the country to live in Mexico. His young mother put Langston in the care of his grandmother, Mary Langston, who lived in Lawrence, Kansas, while she sought work to support him. Although they were financially poor, the little boy had riches that couldn't be added on a calculator. In his formative years he had the love and nurture of an educated grandmother. She sent him to school, and at home filled his mind with stories of the past. His mother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, managed in difficult circumstances, to provide and mother him as much as she was able. As an aspiring actress she liked to entertain her son with recitations of classical poetry. The black community they lived in was warm and welcoming, filled with people who had migrated there to establish new lives in a free state.

When Langston was twelve years old, his aged grandmother passed away. He went to live with his mother and stepfather in Illinois, then later to Ohio where he finished high school. But most of his youth was spent in Kansas, and Kansas is proud to claim him as their own. Out of this humble childhood, Langston carried a great respect and admiration for the poor people he met there, "low-down folks," with their quiet dignity and pride. Of them, he said, "They accept what beauty is their own without question." Like all great writers, he wrote about what he knew best. Many of his poems are about the Kansas where he grew up.

When he was a high school student in Ohio, Langston began writing poetry. He was elected class poet and editor of the high school annual. At the age of eighteen he wrote, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." It was published in "The Crisis," a magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It has also been set to music by many composers. The inspiration for this poem came when he was traveling by train across a bridge, spanning the Mississippi River. It was quickly written on the back of an envelope in about fifteen minutes. Of Langston Hughes it has been said that he found poetry in the ordinary, everyday things of life and made it seem deceptively simple.

Following graduation, Hughes lived for a year with his father, a businessman and landowner in Toluca, Mexico. There was conflict between them over his desire to write. His father wanted him to be an engineer and offered to pay his way in Columbia University. Langston tried briefly to be the dutiful son, but left that course of study within a year to follow his own dreams. As a young adult he earned his living by working at a variety of odd jobs, then broadened his life experience and education with working voyages to Africa and Europe. He jumped ship in Europe and lived in Paris for several months, and later a month in Venice, Italy, where he wrote "I too am America." When he returned home, he lived with his mother for a year in Washington, D.C. In 1924, he moved to Harlem, New York. Inspired by visits to a Harlem cabaret, Hughes wrote his first book of poetry, "The Weary Blues," which was published to good reviews in 1926. He returned to the classroom as a mature student and graduated from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in June 1929.

Hughes loved not only the people of his time, but also their music, especially blues songs that express sad themes. The jazz clubs of Chicago, New York, Kansas City and Washington, D. C. were a major influence on his writing. It has been said of Hughes that he was innovative and ahead of his time. He was the first to give America hip-hop or spoken-word art. Rap music today is but another form of this oral tradition. And yet, he was also criticized as being too common and lacking in poetic style. His use of dialect was a sore point for some. But Hughes wasn't bothered by any of this, he simply wrote what he experienced and what he learned from the everyday folks around him. His 1920s poetry featured the stories of his Afro-American brothers and sisters in their own vernacular, a loving presentation of the joys and heartaches of everyday life. He mirrored their thoughts, echoed their voice, and was much loved for giving their life experience back to them in song. "The Weary Blues" is representative of this period. These poems are spoken of as jazz and blues poems. In 1958 he recorded his poetry to the music of jazz and blues artists.

In the years of Great Depression, the 1930s, Hughes' poetry took on a radical, political tone. In 1935, "Let America Be America Again" spoke poignantly of a heartfelt plea for free life for all, in a land that is free. And "Goodbye Christ" is a defiant statement of a conversion to socialism that created a furor in political and religious circles and caused Hughes to be fiercely condemned for what was viewed as evidence of a pro-communist stand at a time when paranoia in politics ruled the day. In order to establish himself anew, as an unequivocally four-square American, he later repudiated this poem and suppressed others with socialist themes. Near the end of his life, he spoke of this troubled time. "For the poet, politics in any country in the world had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection."

In the 1940s he swung back to earlier topics that he referred to as "Negroes, nature, and love." In the postwar years he settled down in Harlem where he remained, writing poetry that was inspired and shaped by the jazz tunes of black musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. His collected works of poetry include "The Dream Keeper" (1932), a children's collection, "Shakespeare in Harlem" (1942), "Dream Deferred" (1951), "One Way Ticket" (1949), "Montage of a Dream Deferred" (1951) and "The Panther and the Lash" (1967, posthumously).

Langston Hughes is also remembered for a prolific amount of work in other genre. He wrote novels, short stories, histories, essays, stage plays, musicals, anthologies, and a humourous newspaper column. In all of his writing Hughes promoted racial pride with condemnation of racism and injustice in a heartwarming celebration of African American culture. He also translated stories and poems for foreign writers. His first novel, "Not Without Laughter," won the Harmon gold medal for literature in 1930. He wrote two autobiographical volumes. "The Big Sea" (1940) and "I Wonder as I Wander" (1956). In 1961 he was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In his long and distinguished career, Hughes was an inspiration to untold numbers of African American writers.

On May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes died unexpectedly from complications following prostate surgery. He was just 65 years old, a brilliant artist whose voice was silenced much too soon. However, his 46-year legacy of literature lives on in the hearts of the people, and as America’s National Poet 2002 he will be well remembered. In 1991 his cremated remains were interred beneath a commemorative tile floor in the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Visitors to the Centre may view this memoriam and pay their respects.

Some of Langston Hughes's poetry can be found online at The Academy of American Poets. Follow the links through "Langston Hughes Centenary Exhibit." On this web page you can also hear him read his first published poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." In the public library I found, "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes," a complete collection of 860 published poems that reflect his life and times in world travel and African America through five stormy decades.

Langston Hughes had this to say about two commonly asked questions. "What is a poet?"

"A poet is a human being. Each human being must live within his time, with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country."

"What is poetry?"

"It is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words."

It takes courage and wisdom to prevail and write according to one's beliefs. Hughes firmly believed that if a poet would speak to the world he must be true to his inner convictions. About that he said, "Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise you are dead."