Langston Hughes Influences

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Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was a popular American novelist, poet, and playwright, who greatly contributed to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s with his African-American themes (“Langston Hughes Biography”). The most fundamental author’s poems are “Dreams”, “As I Grew Older”, “Mother to Sun”, “April Rain Song”, “I, Too”, “Cross”, “Democracy”, and etc. In addition to a huge number of beloved poetic works, Hughes created eleven plays and prose compositions, containing the famous “Simple” books: “Simple Speaks His Mind”, “Simple Stakes a Claim”, “Simple Takes a Wife”, and “Simple’s Uncle Sam”. He also performed an edition of the anthologies, such as “The Poetry of the Negro” and “The Book of Negro Folklore”; wrote a well-known autobiography,…show more content…
During Hughes’s life, his work included both best-love lyrical poems, and more controversial political works, especially in the thirties. The Hughes’s first book, “The Weary Blue”, published in 1926, is one of the brilliant examples of modernism, a trend in African American literature and culture, which described the particularities of the New Negro movement beginning in the twentieth century. The modernism has led to Harlem Renaissance, which represented various themes to various people and offered an opportunity for black folks to establish in the American society (“The Langston Hughes…show more content…
The style has a typical form, in which the first line includes a statement, the second line contains variation, and the third line reflects an ironic alternative (“Poetic Form: Blue Poems”). He was first to recognize the blues are complex, and one of the most appropriate literary tools for reflecting folk’s feelings both in tragic and comic genre. The blues greatly contributed to making romance a modern literary trend; while modernism was established on a basis of the blues’ new way of expressing what is seeing (Young). In writing blue poems, Hughes used specific irony and earthy tone for describing such themes as struggle, sex, race and despair. In the essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston expressed his ashamed attitude towards black poets, who wanted to act not as a Negro poet, but as just a poet without race. He was always honest in his writings about the society in which he was born; therefore, he could not ignore the topic of race, which is closely related to the author’s every aspect of his life, writing, public understanding, and reputation. His subject was extremely diverse and rich: the poems interrelated with music, American society, politics, love, the blues, desires, and dreams. The artist was inspired by ordinary people with ordinary lifestyles, and by a world of African Americans that
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