Langston Hughes is a writer of wide experience. He worked as doorman, cook, waiter, sailor, and in restaurants as a boy. He wrote plays, stories, and poems. He is a controversial writer. His works had significant influence in the Harlem Renaissance. Most of his poems reflect the socio-economic conditions of the blacks living in American society. A critical review of Hughes’s poems, after having a close look at Arnold Rampersad’s “Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew”, is the focus of this paper.
Rampersad, the biographer of Langston Hughes, says that Fine Clothes to the Jew is not a successful volume, though it is Hughes’s greatest collection, which was published when the poet was at the height of his creative activities. At the same time, he points out that it was one of the most significant volumes of poetry ever published in America. Rampersad compares Fine Clothes to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He also highlights the influence of Whitman on Langston Hughes. Three important aspects of Langston’s poems are explained by him. They are: 1. isolation, despair, and suicide, 2. aggressive socialism and non-racial intelligence, and 3. response to the needs of black people. Although the poet’s subject is racism, Rampersad argues that the poet makes a separate aesthetic approach to poetry and art. Like Whitman, there is an authentic search for the American poetic language. In short, Hughes’s poetry has a perfect blend of artistic spirit and the black spirit. Rampersad notes that Langston Hughes “is able to affect a distinguished fusion of learned poetic values with those of the despised masses” (Rampersad 146). It is an apt evaluation of the poet.
The main subject matter of Langston’s poetry is the struggle of an Afro-American for equality. In “Theme of English B” this is how he dramatizes an assignment given to a black student by his English teacher: “Go home and write/ a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you—/ Then, it will be true” (English B). The event takes place in Harlem, a place which was the centre of renaissance. The subject matter of the assignment is the true portrayal of the student’s life in one page. The truth from an Afro-American should obviously be his inner feelings about the racial discrimination which he undergoes. The student writes that he wants: “to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. / I like to work, read, learn, and understand life” (Hughes). These are the basic needs of a human being. The real problem, according to the student, is that “I am the only colored student in my class” (Hughes). His sincere confession in his paper raises some difficult questions.
What this Afro-American student feels and writes is true of all the black people. These basic feelings are also universal; at least they are true for all the Americans. Yet, he says, “It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me/ at twenty-two, my age” (English B). The paradox here is that in spite of this realization, the Whites want to keep their separate identity in all areas of social life. Therefore, the student asks his White teacher why he does not want to be a “part of me”, “as I am a part of you. / That’s American” (English B). The poet questions here the Americanism of America. The student wants Harlem to “hear me”, to hear the voice of his pathetic situation. The poem thus attains the revolutionary voice of an Afro-American youth.
Langston Hughes thinks that what the blacks are denied are also denied to the entire America. This great country stands for certain values. Therefore, what is deprived to a citizen is deprived to the whites too. In “Let America be America Again”, the poet says, “O, let my land be a land where liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath” (“Let America”). Like Whitman, Hughes too wants to uphold the values for which America stands. The poet is conscious of the contributions the black people make to make their country prosperous. He asks “Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, / Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, / Must bring back our mighty dream again” (Let”). Here Langston is aware of the “mighty dream” and he is also equally conscious of the “sweat and blood” of the blacks in realizing this dream. Then, how can these toiling mass be kept out of the mainstream life of their society is the great question the poet raises in his poems. To put it short, the contradiction between the American dream and the racial reality in his country occupies the poet’s concern.
Langston Hughes’s style of writing poems has been highly praised by one and all. He has a beautiful taste for music. Without sacrificing the artistic qualities of poetry, he fuses blues and jazz into his poems. The spirit of Harlem dissolves into the music of his poems, and the political and racial emotions of the exploited merge with the structure of his poems. His style is both provocative and innovative.
Rampersad is an authority on the poet, Langston Hughes. His critical observations are quite important. However, the racial attitude today is undergoing a rapid change in America. What was valid at the time of publication of Langston Hughes’s early volumes like Fine Clothes to the Jew cannot be the same now. What his poems contributed to the change in racial attitudes in America also cannot be ignored. In the words of Lloyd Brown, Hughes “ironically invokes the myth of the American Revolution, with its attendant dream of equality and socio-economic fulfillment, and then pits these against
the Black American condition of deprivation and rebellious impatience” (Brown). Therefore, he can be called a national poet.
Reference
Brown, Lloyd W. “The American Dream and the Legacy of Revolution in the Poetry of Langston Hughes.” Studies in Black Literature. 16-18. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Vol. 10. Detroit: Gale Research, 1979. 16-18. Literature Resource Center. Gale. COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON. 2009. Web.
Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B”. Web.
Hughes, Langston. “Let America be America”. Web.
Rampersad, Arnold. “Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew”. Callaloo, No. 6 (Winter 1986), John Hopkins University Press. pp 144- 158.