...Langston Hughes inspiration for poetry was Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg and is thought of as the, “African American poet laureate, a writer who is able to sing eloquently about the reality and idealism of democracy in America” (Schilb, Clifford, 2014). Langston Hughes wrote, “Let America be America Again” in a 1938 pamphlet that he wrote entitled, A New Song. This pamphlet was in response to the communism called popular front that took place in the United States during the 1930’s. During this time Marxist principles were being conjoined to traditional American ideas and values. “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed ---“ (Hughes, 1938) a quote written by Langston Hughes in his poem ties the overall theme of the “idealistic rhetoric...
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...The Evolution of Langston Hughes In the 1900s America was constantly evolving. Langston Hughes, an African American poet, wrote poems about civil rights, hope, and the American dream that inspired other African Americans to fight for equality in the 1900s. Hughes wrote during a time period that African Americans were not treated equally. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was signed creating equality and ending segregation for African Americans. As America changed, Hughes perspective on America and equality evolved affecting his writing. In the beginning of Hughes’s writing career he was critical of America, but was inspiring to the lower class. For example, In “Let America Be America Again”, by Langston Hughes, he states, “There’s never been equality...
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...that America is successful, fearless,and the land of opportunity. Particularly, Walt Whitman's poem” I Hear America Singing and Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again” are expressing their views of their two different world. Even though the poem” I Hear America Singing” and “Let America Be America Again” have many similarities they have many differences too;one of those differences is how their races affect their points of view. America's legacy of freedom has been questioned though slavery and segregation. These two subjects have been a problem for generation separating races and giving two different views of america. Though between these differences there are similarities that we see eye to eye with. For example Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes are both famous poets, but Walt Whitman's america is different from Langston Hughes because he grew up as A white and Langston Hughes grew up as a black-sadly affecting their views. Even though they're both talking about the american dream “I Hear America Singing” Expresses america as the dream it was supposed to be, then “Let America Be America Again” shows that the american...
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...poets dealt with through their works, you could easily see the social, economic and cultural lifestyles they lived in. One of the historical poets I have had the opportunity of reading and learning about was Langston Hughes. His work sheds light on readers of today, on the social culture and ways of the early 1900’s to mid 1900’s. The unfortunate issue of slavery and inequality was very prevalent in the writings of Mr. Hughes. He wrote with a sense of the unfairness he was dealing with, as well as being a voice for those enduring the segregation as well. Only a few of his poems allowed us to see he had a hopeful side and would appear to write on day dream type things, like the sun and the rain. I wanted to point out on two particular poems that Hughes wrote, “Democracy” and “Let America be America Again”. In these poems many of the social indiscrepencies were obviously a huge factor in the way he felt. But as I read through these poems I could almost see a few similarities with the social issues of this present time. Although the segregation and separation was indeed more prevalent in the time of Hughes, the views he shares in these two poems are quite comparable to some of the views that society may very well have today. In let “America be America Again” Hughes says “I am the people, humble, hungry, mean---Hungry yet today despite the dream. He says also “beaten today---O Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, the poorest worker bartered through the years.”...
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...Not me?” Langston Hughes stated in his poem Let America Be America Again. Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes have similar writing techniques. Whitman wrote the poem Let America Be America Again while Hughes wrote Let America Be America again. These poems are about 100 years apart and have many similarities and differences. The poems are similar in many ways, but one similarity is that they are both poems about America, the title gives that away though. Also both poems name a list of individuals that are left out of the American dream. "Those of mechanics, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman." (Let America Be America Again) In I Hear America Singing it states "I am the farmer, I am the worker, I am the negro." This American dream that so many people are left out of involves having opportunities...
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...neighborhood of New York City, Harlem certainly attracted the largest concentration of this particular intellect and served as the epicenter of this historic movement. Some of the most famous writers in American history emerged from this cultural awakening and include but are not limited to the talents of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Possibly the most recognizable name of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was a poet and writer who through several publications, became “one of the foremost interpreters to the world of the black experience in the United States” (Hutchinson, 2014). His parents had separated shortly after his birth and was raised mostly by his grandmother. Unfortunately, she had passed while Langston was in his early teens and he had been left with the choice of living with his mother, which is when he first began to cultivate his writing talent. His work during this era was primarily influenced by his life within the now historic New York City neighborhood. Like many other writers at the time, Hughes’ work contained a very “strong sense of racial pride” (America’s Library, no date). Through his works including several poems, books and plays, Hughes promoted racial equality, spoke out against racism, and had celebrated the humor and spirituality of African American culture. Following his death, his Harlem home had been...
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...Harlem Renaissance Strayer University Humanities 112 Professor Renee Pistone November 30, 2014 Harlem renaissance poetry comprises of poems composed in the 1920s by poets such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown. All these poets had different items illustrated in their poems, though they all pointed the oppression of the minority race in America, and their fight to achieve freedom. The focus of this essay is to analyze poems by two different poets during the Harlem Renaissance period, describing the role played by each author in this period. The poems to be analyzed are If We Must Die by Claude McKay and Let America be America Again by Langston Hughes. These two poems pass different messages and show the different wishes of the two poets. McKay and Hughes each contributed to the Harlem Renaissance poetry in varying ways. Hughes was a well-known artist who wrote essays, short stories, poems, and children’s books. He used his poetry to celebrate the African American community and tried to capture the life of the African Americans in his work. His major focus is on dreams, and he gives suggestions of what happens when dreams are ignored and postponed. He, therefore, played a role in airing the dreams of the black Americans who lived in Harlem, and how these dreams were shattered (Bloom, 2004). His poetry is a way of showing that the black Americans had dreams, which if they did not come true would lead...
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...fighting for their rights. During and before this time period, Mr. Langston Hughes wrote several poems about the disparity between race in America. Through vivid imagery, Langston Hughes comments on the nuances of being African American in America in the era of the Civil Rights Movement. In “Theme for English B”, Hughes discusses both the differences and similarities between white and black americans. Hughes paints the reader a great physical and figurative picture of the disparities between the two races by describing the speaker’s college experience. The speaker starts off the poem by highlighting the differences between the white professor, his white classmates, and himself. He says that the speaker is the “only colored student in [his college] class” in a college “on the hill above Harlem”. Harlem is a predominately African American community in New York. It is symbolic that this predominately white college is situated on a hill above the predominately black community of Harlem. Even though the Civil Rights Movement had begun, African Americans still had a long way to go to be able to get up to the “college on the hill” where the white...
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...Kris Kringle Prof. Klump ENG 101 07/04/2021 Let America Be America Again America was once founded on certain principles and ideas; to live a life free from tyranny, to have opportunities for self development, and for equal treatment amongst all people regardless of societal status. Langston Hughes portrays how these qualities fail to exist during a specific time in America in a poem entitled “Let America Be America Again”. The speaker opens up the poem referring to America’s dream of freedom as simply that, a “dream it used to be” (Hughes 2). During a time of racial segregation and where slavery was used to produce, the majority of colored people faced intense hardships by the hand of wealthy, white slave owners. Born not into a land of freedom, but a land of enslavement, the speaker notes that “America never was America to me” (5). It would be difficult to fathom living in a world that preached about freedom and rights while practicing the opposite based on an individual’s skin pigmentation. The earlier populations of America consisted of a variety of ethnicities, from white, black, Native Americans and immigrants from across the globe. It was widely understood that the white man was in charge, with the rest of the population to do whatever their will. In the third stanza of this poem, the speaker notes that “equality is in the air we breathe” (14). It appears that the speaker has a heightened sense of what is truly most important in this life; that we are all living...
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...against were set in order to express personal and collective point of view. Yet in the nineteenth century the question of American domination in the world economics was set: “Shall the American people continue their resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind?” (Albert J. Beveridge, 1). The commercial domination of the United States caused contradictory feelings in the hearts of Americans and people of the whole world. The same time the words of admiration and the honest governmental policy. The country that is brining democracy to the whole world: “America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being-confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented-a vast improvement over the fatalistic and intolerant human beings that traditional societies have always produced, and Islamic societies produce now” (Dinesh D’Souza, 2005). He is considered Americans to be the outstanding nation of those who set for democracy and eager to set the nations free (from terrorism, for example, if we speak about Islamic countries). According to Albert Beveridge a number of violations of human rights were observed in the end the 19th century and it seriously undermine the authority of the country and the government as well: “The rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority...
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...born in 1902, Langston Hughes’ America was struggling to heal the wounds from the Civil War and reconstruction while facing the struggles of racism and desegregation. Hughes’ personal struggles began very early in life with the divorce of his parents. His father relocated to Mexico because he, as a black man, was not allowed to take the Bar Exam in America. His mother was a teacher and political activist who moved frequently with her husband to find work. As a result of financial struggles, Langston was primarily raised by his maternal grandmother after the divorce of his parents. Not understanding why he was not allowed to live with either of his parents was a source of much hurt for him. “These feelings of rejection caused him to grow up very insecure and unsure of himself” (www.kansasheritage.org). Following the death of his grandmother, he lived briefly with his mother and step-father but did not move with them when they relocated again to find work. As a child, his circle of support was often the small group of blacks living in his community. As a young African-America adult, he found a kinship in Harlem, New York’s New Negro Movement (Harlem Renaissance). While the poem “Theme for English B” is not autobiographical, the insecurity Hughes felt as a young man is echoed in the struggle of the poem’s unnamed protagonist to find himself, his truth, while enduring the racism and struggle for social equality that all blacks were struggling with in America at that time...
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...and their search for better quality of life in the North and Midwest, henceforth the Great Migration. Some of the most prominent names during this time was African American poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, both playing an essential role to the literary movement. As stated by McKay, “their poems are full of hushes, whispers, sighs, songs, tongues, throats, wails, moans, voices, speech, music, hymns, blues, sobs, cries, lashes, yowls, jazz, scatting, drums, thunder, drones, shouts, trumpets, trains, whistles, choirs, horns, and all sorts of other raucous sound” (1926). Langston Hughes was notably known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance and also deemed as the “Father of Harlem Renaissance poetry”. Hughes solidified his legacy in the Harlem Renaissance subsequently after the publishing of his first poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, which is one of his most notable poems. The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which was influenced from his time passing the Mississippi River to visit his family, was later published in 1926 in his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. In regards to the poem, Phillipson describes it as “grounding itself specifically in a diasporic consciousness that embraces the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile as rivers of Black geography” (2006). Another notable poem from Hughes was “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” which was published in The Nation in 1926. The poem took aim at African American artists who seemed to be accommodating to be more...
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...The poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langton Hughes has different meanings. This poem begins to talk about how the pioneers first came to America in the search of what many people call “The American Dream”. It talks about how they came to America seeking for equality and liberty, but is it America really a place of liberty and equality? This is what Hughes makes us question our self about. The poem speaks of the American dream that never existed for the lower class American. It also talks about the freedom and equality that every immigrant hoped for but never achieved. In his poem, Hughes represents not only African Americans, but other minority groups as well. Besides criticizing the unfair life in America, the poem conveys a sense of hope that the American Dream is soon to come. Which I think is something that even now many people can relate to. This poem is written in 1935. Langston Hughes is writing a poem of someone who feels that America does not live up to what it should be. The tone is angry and resentful. In this poem it’s not representing the point of view of one particular group. It’s saying that there are many people who’ve come here with hopes and dreams and they’re being let down. He’s also saying that there is an economic difference between people. In essence the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, because there is not equal opportunity. That idea is something that is not real for many people because of their race, economic situation, and come up...
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...“Let America Be America Again” is a poem not about just one group of people, but about African Americans, immigrants, poor white people, American Indians, and any and all groups who have been left out. When Mr. Hughes says: “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— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” (Hughes 697) He speaking is for everyone, except the rich and privileged as we see in the line that says: Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed (Hughes 697) It is important for us all to remember this land is for everyone, not just the privileged. Reading this poem and passing it on to others is a good way to remember what this country initially stood for and what most people are still fighting for. At one time America stood for liberty, equality, and the land of the free. When Mr. Hughes states “Let it be the dream it used to be” and “America never was America to me” we understand that he never has felt America was equal or free, but we also see that Mr. Hughes wants America to fulfill the promises of freedom, liberty, and equality. I enjoyed this part of the poem because it reminded me of why people came to this country and still come to this country...
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...way is to read Langston Hughes’s works. Hughes writes lots of poetry about pursuing an American Spirit which realizes no discrimination, freedom and equality in the entire American society. Hughes hopes all African American can be respected by entire society. African Americans have relatively equal chances to compete with white people and have similar living condition as whites’ families which at least have a house and a car. The two poems of Hughes’ “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” describe Hughes’ desired American Spirit. In these two poems “ I, Too” and Theme for English B”, Hughes shares his experience as African American who lives under basic living condition, in hopes of encouraging more blacks to fight for equal rights. From the poem “I, too”, Hughes writes “I, too, sing America” (ln.1). As a common American people who learn American history and love American culture, although Hughes ’ancestry is African, he was born and grew up in the Unites States. Hughes also writes “I, too, am America” (ln.18). Although white people and black people have different skin color and background in the United States, they are all American. People can learn some idea about equality from Hughes. Hughes says when guests come to their home, white person can eat at the table but darker brother only can eat in the kitchen in the poem “I, Too”. From the poem “Theme for English B”, Hughes writes “Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me” (li.29). Hughes states that a white...
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