BLOG ENTRY #2:
My blog entry for this week is about the “Harlem Renaissance” poet Langston Hughes. The poem I am going to be discussing is “Let America be America Again,” which Langston Hughes wrote in, 1935. Remember that this was the time of racism, inequality and the Great Depression.
Is this a pro-America or anti-America poem? Neither is correct. Langston felt as though this America was not how he thought it should be. Though it is the “Land of the Free,” Langston felt that we need to go back and really make America what it was or what again should be. He did state in the poem that “There’s never been equality for me, nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.” He goes on to stress that he did not feel free and again expressing examples of this in his poem. “Who said free? Not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay?” The desperation and compassion of Langston’s poem ended up in the end expressing that “we must take back our land again, America!” (Langston-poem).
“Let America be America Again,” is an American poem written by a black African American poet that is about the lack of equality, the treatment of our poor and any injustice that seemed to be happening. And who is its primary audience? All of us are Langston’s primary audience. His audience is anyone that has felt or been treated unfairly and not treated as equals. Langston puts on the shoes of everyone and speaks on everyone’s behalf. “I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek. I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.” (Langston-poem)
However, Langston’s poem received mixed reviews. According to the Poetry Foundation’s biography on Langston Hughes, the poem was well received by the literary magazines and the white press but not well received by the Negro critics for example; The Pittsburg Courier headline across the top page called “Langston Hughes book of poems trash”, the New York Amsterdam news said that Langston Hughes-A Sewer Dweller and the Chicago Whip characterized him as “the poet low-rate of Harlem, and others called his book “A disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public.” These reviews bothered Langston to some extent and he felt that he did not upper class Negro’s well enough to write much about them.” He also stated that “he felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and ability to work up in education,” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/langston-hughes).
Langston was one of the very few Black American poets who could live souly off his poetry and lectures across the United States. He was able to bring together many different kinds of people and their issues or tribulations.
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1. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission. |
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More at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609#sthash.M19Id0Wu.dpuf |
2. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/langston-hughes
3. Langston Hughes. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 11:15, Sep 13, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/langston-hughes-9346313.
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