Langston Hughes

This week was possibly my favorite week of poetry, as discussed at the beginning of this semester the topic I was most interested in learning about was the period of the Harlem Renaissance. The poet that stands out to me from this period is Langston Hughes. After reading his poem Theme for English B in class i learned he had spent some time in our town of Durham, North Carolina which intrigued me even more. In my opinion Langston Hughes was the founding father of art in African American culture. He helped develop a style of poetry that would influence literature, music, theater, and create a following of people young and old to become motivated by his activism on issues of racial and social justice.

       The peer reviewed article that I chose to write this blog post about is called “Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes During the Cold War” By Johnathan Scott. In this article Scott addresses the issues Langston Hughes faced with the controversial theme of his poetry. Johnathan Scott viewed Langston Hughes as I did saw him as a significant trademark for the culture, “…Politically he served as a Black national advocate for international socialism, mainly through his journals and poetry, as an artists he asserted the international scale of American national struggle to abolish racial oppression…”.  Much of his art was “blacklisted” by white supremacists and therefore didn’t gain the recognition it should have. Johnathan Scott recognizes that Langston Hughes was not acknowledged during his time as he should have been, in this passage Scott compares the wealth accumulated from the works of William Faulkner to the works of Hughes, “…Hughes remained unable to support himself as a writer. Ironically it was not proceeds from his published works, but a $1000 cash grant from The Academy…” From this excerpt of the article we can see that Langston Hughes was not flourishing in his popularity during this time period, it took over 20 years for his works to be really appreciated widely in American culture.

Scott, Jonathan. “Advanced, repressed, and popular: Langston Hughes during the cold war (1).” College Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, 2006, p. 30+. Literature Resource Center, https://link-gale-com.proxy055.nclive.org/apps/doc/A145877315/GLS?u=durham_tccl&sid=GLS&xid=0ab94076. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.