Analyze how Hughes uses poetic elements and techniques to convey his complex attitude toward his home, America
In a well-developed essay, analyze how Hughes uses poetic elements and techniques to convey his complex attitude toward his home, America.
How Hughes uses poetic elements and techniques to convey his complex attitude toward his home America
In the following poem by Langston Hughes, the speaker, an African American, reflects on his place in the world. Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-developed essay, analyze how Hughes uses poetic elements and techniques to convey his complex attitude toward his home, America.
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Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
Langston Hughes was one of the most prolific writers of Harlem Renaissance era. Hughes’s works are for the sense of black pride they convey and also Hughes’s implantation of jazz into his poetry.
In 1926, Hughes wrote the critically acclaimed essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” for The Nation magazine. In this essay, Hughes scolds artists who shy away from their racial identity to satisfy
fearful Negros and white audiences.
fearful Negros and white audiences.
Hughes’s message to white audiences recognizes their interest in black art for means of stereotypical entertainment. Some of Hughes’s most powerful poems, including “I, Too” and “Freedom,” serve as keen evidence of the blasphemous behavior of Negro artists and white audiences of his time.In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes speaks of a young Negro poet who has proclaimed he does not want to be an African-American poet, but instead, just a poet.
Hughes associates this comment with the Negro poet meaning he would rather be a white poet and a whiter person. Nina Baym cites the evidence of Hughes’s outspoken protest on this matter, stating, “Early and late, Hughes’s poems demanded that African Americans be acknowledged as owners of the culture they gave to the United States and also as fully enfranchised American citizens” (Baym 2027).
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