http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/mountain.htm
http://www.pbs.org/jazz/
"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black...let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let's do the impossible. Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic." Aaron Douglas
"I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools... I don't see how a history of the United States can be written honestly without including the Negro." Jacob Lawrence
Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing. We have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst of creative expression. There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart. Justifiably then, we speak of the offerings of this book embodying these ripening forces as culled from the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance.
ALAIN LOCKE.
Washington, D. C.November, 1925
http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/locke_new.pdf.
"I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records-Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn't make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races." Theme for English B
"And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame" Langston Hughes
Josephine Baker
"Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz." Langston Hughes
Look at Hughes in an historical context. He is just one part of this emerging black creativity of the Renaissance. See him as a modernist. The European Modernists, such as Eliot, wrote of the horrors of WW1. Hughes and other artists saw the horrors of migration and oppression. His work reflects real life and gets you to think. Look for realism, like Twain, in his writings-the use of common people, the mimicing of reality and the use of dialect (jazz). View his work as a reflection of folktales-be creative and compare his style to Whitman.
Some important events to consider as well. In the postemancipation years, there was postreconstruction that created a backlash against Blacks in the South-denial of voting rights(taxes and literacy), Jim Crow laws, KKK (lynchings), and Plessey v. Ferguson (separate, but equal). Minsteral shows featured whites in black face. Creatively, Blacks "faced an undertow of sharp criticism and understanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from whites." (Racial Mountain).
With this in mind, let's look at Hughes's life.
Langston Hughes
“The Bard of Harlem”
· Born in Joplin, Missouri February 1, 1902 to Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, a poet and actress, and James Nathaniel Hughes, a stenographer
· Parents separated
o Langston lived with his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas
§ Also with his mother in Cleveland and Detroit
§ They lived in a state of constant poverty
o His father, who was disgusted with racism in America, fled to Mexico
· Attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio
o Excelled in track
o Elected “class poet”
o Became editor of high-school annual
o Graduated in June of 1920
· Hughes spent a year with his father in Mexico
· In 1921, at age 18, Langston moved to Harlem and enrolled in Columbia University
o Hughes’ father was inconsistent with his monetary contributions to Hughes’ education
o Hughes felt alienated from the white majority at Columbia
o He left after only one year of study
· Hughes published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis
o Meet W.E.B. DuBois and Countee Cullen, both of whom were associated with The Crisis
· Hughes worked as a merchant seaman, a cook at a jazz nightclub in Paris, the personal assistant to Carter G. Woodson (the founder of what became “Black History Month”, and a busboy in Washington, D.C.
o While working, Hughes tried, unsuccessfully, to save money to enroll in college again
o In 1923 Hughes wrote “The Weary Blues” after visiting a cabaret in Harlem
o While trying to return to the United States from Paris, Hughes was stranded in Genoa, where he wrote “I, Too.”
· Hughes won the first prize in poetry in Oppurtunity’s literary contest for “The Weary Blues”
· Carl Van Vechten, a wealthy, white patron of the Harlem Renaissance, admired Hughes’ poetry and helped him get his first works published with publisher Alfred A. Knopf
o Van Vechten and Hughes developed a lifelong friendship and kept an extensive correspondence
· Hughes’ first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in January of 1926
o Received several positive reviews
· Blues arranger W.C. Handy put several of Hughes’ poems to music
· Hughes enrolled at Lincoln University, an all-black college in Chester Pennsylvania, in 1926
o He received his B.A. in 1929
· Published Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927, which was harshly criticized for Hughes’ portrayal of the supposedly seedy side of the blues lifestyle and of black culture
· Around this time, Hughes met Zora Neale Hurston, with whom he travelled and collaborated
· In 1930, Hughes published Not Without Laughter to rave reviews
· In the same year, Hughes publishes, Mulatto, a play that deals with miscegenation
· In 1931, Hughes toured the South lecturing and reading poetry at as many predominately black colleges and universities as possible
o Negro Mother was published form by Alfred A. Knopf in a $1 pamphlet at Hughes’ request, so that Southern blacks were able to afford it
o While in the South, Hughes became familiar with the Scottsboro case.
§ 12 boys, whose ages ranged from 12 to 20, were falsely accused, indicted, and convicted of raping two white women and were subsequently sentenced to death
§ Hughes visited them at Kilby Prison in Montgomery
§ He released a poem titled “At Scottsboro” about the trials
§ After his exposure to the Scottsboro case, Hughes became increasingly active in politics
· He joined many of the protests of the trials
· He sided with the communist International Labor Defense
· He eventually became the President of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights
§ In 1932, Hughes published Scottsboro Limited, a play with four poems
· Later 1932, Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union under subsidy of the Soviet government to make a movie about race relations in the United States
o Hughes became a communist sympathizer and wrote several communistic poems
o Soviet Union, China, and Japan
§ Expelled from Japan for associating with leftists and sent to San Francisco
· While in California Hughes published a collection of short stories titled The Ways of White Folks in 1934
o Hughes was attacked by anti-leftist vigilantes while living in California
o This combined with the death of his father caused Hughes to flee to Mexico
· In Mexico, Hughes lived with the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and began to translate short stories by Mexican writers
· When Hughes returns to the United States and settles with his mother in Oberlin, Ohio, he found that Mulatto was undergoing production for a Broadway performance series
o Hughes disputed with the producer of the sensationalized version of the play
o Mulatto received scathing reviews
· In 1936 Hughes meets writer Ralph Ellison
· Hughes moved to Europe in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American among several other black newspapers
o In Spain he met with several of the leading European and expatriated American writers, including:
§ Pablo Neruda, W.H. Auden, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and Berthold Brecht
· Hughes’ mother died of breast cancer in 1938
o Hughes leaves Europe for Los Angeles in an attempt to pay for his mother’s funeral
· Hughes’ autobiography The Big Sea was published in 1940
o Evangelical groups picketed outside a public appearance Hughes made while in Los Angeles. Hughes left Los Angeles alarmed and disillusioned and moved back to Harlem.
· In 1942 Shakespeare in Harlem is published by Alfred A. Knopf
· While in Harlem, Hughes began work on a collection of poems about Harlem life
· Hughes took part in a famous debate about segregation on “America’s Town Meeting of the Air.” He was highly successful and exacting in his arguments.
· Hughes began to lecture more frequently and assume part-time and visitor positions at the University of Chicago and Atlanta University
· Life magazine vehemently attacked Hughes, along with physicist Albert Einstein, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, and actor Paul Robeson, for having communist leanings
· In 1951, Hughes released what is arguably his masterwork, Montage of a Dream Deferred, to apathetic reviews
· In 1952 Hughes released his most successful collection of short stories Laughing to Keep from Crying
· On March 21, 1953 Hughes was blacklisted and received a subpoena to appear before Senator Joseph McCarthy and the subcommittee on subversive activities. Hughes would remain on the FBI’s security risk list until 1959.
· Hughes attended the legendary 1956 Newport American Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. The lineup included jazz legends such as Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, At Newport, Duke Ellington gave one of his most acclaimed performances, which featured the renowned 27-chorus solo by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves
· In 1958, Hughes began to collaborate with the avant-garde hard-bop bassist and composer Charles Mingus
· Hughes performed at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. He served as emcee, read a narrative script, and recited a few poems. Newport’s 1960 lineup was one of the most celebrated and included the Oscar Peterson Trio, Cannonball Adderly, Otis Spann, Ray Brown, James Cotton, John Lee Hooker, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Nina Simone, the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, Muddy Waters, and Ray Charles. Riots broke out during several of the performances, and when Hughes caught word that the promoters were going to cancel the festival and end the festival series, he quickly composed “Goodbye Newport Blues.” Muddy Waters then performed Hughes’ poem set to a blues standard, with the hopes of quelling the crowd.
· Carl Van Vechten passed away in 1964
· Hughes toured several African countries, including Senegal, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, giving lectures and readings.
· In 1967, Hughes gave a reading at UCLA and spoke in strong opposition to the Vietnam War
· Hughes past away at New York Polyclinic Hospital after complications from prostate surgery at the age of 65
OK, We offered our presentation and thesis on Langston, now what do the scholars have to say?
In "Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric, the Poetry of Langston Hughes," Anita Patterson came up with the following:
* There is, however, much to be learned about how his (Hughes) blues and jazz poetics fit in the development of the modernist lyric, both in the United States and Europe, and conversley, how his engagement with modernism contributed to his technique as a realist.
* In "Weary Blues", notice the perspective of the Blues singer and how it is in constrast with the speaker who is trying to put meaning into the song.
* In "Weary Blues", the poem may be seen to enact, however, a renunciation of metaphor-a despairing gesture suggesting that imaginative dreamlike escapes from the "outer world do nothing to change socail conditions.
* In "Weary Blues", Hughes implies that the conventional blues idiom is so compelling, and so limited, as to threaten his imaginative freedom. Also look at the dangers that he implies from modernization: the gas light, the rickety stool.
* "As we have seen, the stylistic complexity of many of Hughes's poems creates a clarifying perspective on the folk tradition and distances him from racial separaist explanation of culture."
* In Eliot, "many of the poems centered on the changing nature of musical experience and the devasting, far-reaching consequences of European nationalism that culminated in WW1.
* Look at Eliot for his references to jazz and ragtime-"O O O O O that Shakespere rag."
Patterson, Anita. "Jazz, Realism and the Modernist Lyric, the Poetry of Langston Hughes." MLQ 61.4 (2000): 651-682.
Now, I am sure that we have totally butchered Dr. Patterson's 33 page essay on the subject, and she would probably be disgusted by our simplistic view of her piece, but hey, that is why she has a PhD after her name and we do not. Basically, there is a common theme of modernism in Hughes and Eliot, both with their horror of war and oppresion, and that there is a common lyrical theme with jazz and ragtime.
Alright, we totally destroyed one piece of critical analysis, let's make it 2 for 2.
In "Do Right to Write: Langston Hughes's Aesthetics of Simplicity", Dr. Karen Ford argues that most people only remember Hughes for his "Rivers" work, but however beautiful it is, the poem is his most uncharateristic, that most anthologies of literature ignore his most important, and typical works "only a small and predictable segment has been perserved." She goes on to say that "the repression of the great bulk of Hughes's poems is the result of chronic critical scorn for their simplicity." Again, another 30+ page paper on Hughes that has a lot to say. While researching critical work on Hughes, it was very difficult to find pieces that were included in our Norton Anthology. Almost all seem to focus on his "Jew", and "Dream" and "Simple" poems. There were a number of pieces on Hughes's queerness and the queer poetry that he wrote, but they were not in the Norton Anthology. We got the impression, though not proven, scholars look at Hughes's poems very differently.
Ford, Karen. "Do Right to Write: Langston Hughes's Aesthetics of Simplicity". Twenieth Century Literature: A Scholary and Critical Journal 38.4 (1992) Winter: 436-56.
We are almost through here as we just have the question portion of the assignment left. So here are the questions that we came up with. Respond or comment on your question, or if you think that the question sucks then present a question that you believe is more substantial or relevant, or identify a piece of Hughes's work that you really like, a piece that is meaningful to you and share it with the class. Tell us why it is meaningful, and, if possible, make some kind of connection to our world today.
1) In "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", what significance, if any, is there in the particular rivers in which Hughes speaks?
2) Of the Blues, Hughes wrote, "I prefer the moaning ones" with that in mind, what solance does the "Weary Blues" provide for the traveler described in the poem?
3) In "Refuge in America" what might the speaker know when he says, "there are words like liberty/that almost make me cry/if you know what I knew/you would know why?
4) Hughes once described "white philanthrophy" as "well-meaning, but dumb." How can this view of the relations and actions of white people be applied to the poem "Madam and Her Madam"?
5) In what ways does Hughes criticize the cultural establishment and the cultural tradition in "Notes on Commercial Theatre"?
6) Do you see any influences of the Harlem Renaissance or Hughes in our culture today? What are they?
7) Look at Hughes in an historical context. Identify and describe another writer we studied thus far and put him/her in an historical context as well.
8) Identify other writers that we studied in which we can put into the modernist or realist category and describe why.
9) Is it important to study Hughes? Why, or why not? After this presentation you now know themes and influences of his writing? So what?
10) We now have a President Elect who is Black. From what we talked about today, or from what you read, what would Hughes write about, or how would he describe this event?
Later-Adam & Bob
