- Hi, I'm John Green.
This is Crash Course Literature,
and today we're gonna discuss the poetry of Langston Hughes.
So, the Harlem Renaissance
was an early 20th-century movement
in which writers and artists of color
explored what it means to be an artist,
what it means to be black,
and what it means to be an American,
and also what it means to be
all three of those things at the same time.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green!
Does the Harlem Renaissance have anything to do
with that Renaissance with like Leonardo da Vinci
and all of the other Ninja Turtles?
Kind of, but the Harlem Renaissance happened
a lot later than the European Renaissance,
also on a different continent,
and there was much less plague and much more jazz.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so one journalist
described the Harlem Renaissance this way:
"What a crowd!
"All classes and colors met face to face,
"ultra aristocrats, bourgeois, communists,
"park avenue galore, bookers, publishers,
"Broadway celebs, and Harlemites
"giving each other the once over."
What's the once over?
Is that a dirty thing, Stan?
Apparently it is not a dirty thing.
The Harlem Renaissance began just after the First World War
and lasted into the early years of the Great Depression
because it turns out,
it's pretty hard to have a renaissance
when no one has any money as they found out in Venice.
And like the European Renaissance,
it was a social and political movement,
but also an artistic one.
I mean, it inspired literature and poetry,
music, drama, ethnography,
publishing, dance, fashion,
probably even some novelty cocktails.
As Langston Hughes wrote about this time,
"The negro was in vogue."
Oh, it must be time for the open letter.
Oh look, it's a floating dictionary,
An open letter to language.
Hey there, language, how's it going?
Don't say it's going good, language.
Say it's going well.
So, Langston Hughes often used the term negro
to refer to African Americans,
and when we quote him or his poetry,
we're also going to use that term,
but we won't use it when I'm talking about African Americans
or the African-American experience
because these days,
we understand that term to be offensive.
I would argue this is a good thing about language.
It has the opportunity to evolve
and to become more inclusive.
In short, language, I love you,
and I'm amazed by you every day.
Sorry if that sounds creepy.
I feel like I might start singing
the song from The Bodyguard,
so I'm just gonna stop right now.
Best wishes, John Green.
Right, so the poems, essays, and novels
of the Harlem Renaissance often discuss
the so-called double consciousness
of the African-American experience,
a term coined by W.E.B. Du Bois
in his book The Souls of Black Folk
and which you might remember
from our To Kill A Mockingbird episode.
Some writers like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay
used poetic forms historically associated
with European white people like the Shakespearean sonnet,
the Petrarchan sonnet, and the villanelle,
which is like a very fancy sonnet.
But other writers, including Langston Hughes,
chose forms based on African
and African-American folk forms,
you know, fables and spirituals,
children's rhymes and blues songs.
This is actually part of modernism generally
as artists sought to mix high and low culture
in an attempt to reinvent art.
Like see also Marcel Duchamp putting a toilet
in an art gallery.
I should clarify
there were already toilets in art galleries.
He was putting it there as art.
Anyway, let's go to the thought bubble
for some background on Langston Hughes.
Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri
to mixed-race parents who divorced early.
He grew up in Kansas
and began to write poetry in high school
mostly because white students chose him as class poet.
In his autobiography, he wrote,
"Well, everyone knows--except us--
"that all negroes have rhythm,
"so they elected me class poet.
"I felt I couldn't let my white classmates down,
"and I've been writing poetry ever since."
Hughes' father wanted him to become a mining engineer,
so Hughes went to Columbia University,
but he left after his freshman year
in part because other students had snubbed him
and in part because he actually didn't want
to be a mining engineer.
So, he signed on to work on a boat
going more or less around the world,
returning a couple of years later,
this is true,
with a red-haired monkey named Jocko.
He didn't enjoy the trip very much,
but that might've actually been a good thing
because he as wrote in his autobiography,
"My best poems were all written when I felt the worst.
"When I was happy, I didn't write anything,"
which stands in stark contrast to all the happy poets,
you know, Emily Dickinson,
Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Hughes aimed to write an accessible, familiar language,
and in that, he was influenced
by poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar
and also people like Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman,
all of whom wrote in vernacular, everyday language
in the hopes that their work could appeal
to a larger audience.
Thanks, thought bubble.
So, as Hughes wrote in a 1927 essay,
classical forms didn't support the work he wanted to do.
"Certainly, the Shakespearean sonnet would be no mold
"in which to express the life
"of Beale Street or Lenox Avenue,
"nor could the emotions of State Street
"be captured in rondeau.
"I am not interested in doing tricks with rhymes.
"I am interested in reproducing the human soul if I can."
And this is what makes Hughes such an important poet.
He brilliantly combines formal poetry
with the oral tradition,
and he refuses to draw a bright line
between fine art and folk art.
Okay, in order to have a better understanding
of Hughes' approach to poetry,
let's look at an early manifesto he wrote
called The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.
In this essay, he criticizes other black writers
for being too interested in white culture and white forms.
He writes, "This is the mountain standing in the way
"of any true negro art in America--
"this urge within the race toward whiteness,
"the desire to pour racial individuality
"into the mold of American standardization,
"and to be as little negro
"and as much American as possible."
Now, some black writers, like Countee Cullen,
accused Hughes of being too black.
Like in a review of Hughes' first book, Cullen wrote,
"There is too much emphasis on strictly negro themes."
But then again, later on,
James Baldwin would condemn Hughes
for not diving deep enough into African-American experience.
Like Baldwin wrote that Hughes' poems
"take refuge finally in a fake simplicity
"in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity
"of the experience."
It's hard out there for Langston Hughes.
Anyway, let's make up our own mind.
I think the best way to get a sense
of how Langston Hughes expresses himself
is probably to like actually read a couple of his poems.
Let's begin with The Negro Speaks of Rivers.
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flow of human blood and human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi
when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,
and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Here's a bit of news that will be discouraging
to most of you aspiring writers out there.
Hughes' wrote that poem
just after graduating from high school.
He was riding a train to see his estranged father,
and he passed over the Mississippi.
He writes, "I began to think about what that river,
"the old Mississippi, had meant to negroes in the past,
"and then I began to think about other rivers in our past:
"the Congo and the Niger and the Nile in Africa.
"And the thought came to me,
"'I've known rivers,'
"and I put it down on the back of an envelope
"I had in my pocket,
"and within the space of 10 or 15 minutes
"as the train gathered speed in the dusk,
"I had written this poem."
Are you even serious?
10 or 15 minutes?
That, what, really?
So, The Negro Speaks of Rivers is in the lyric mode.
It's poetry trying to capture an internal emotional state.
He uses the vision of these rivers
to transcend his immediate relationships
and connect himself instead
to all of his African forefathers,
trading the immediate for the immortal.
The repetition of "I've known rivers" at the beginning
and "My soul has grown deep like the rivers"
at the middle and end
gives the poem the feeling of like a sermon or spiritual
in keeping with Hughes' used of folk forms.
And then there's the catalog of active verbs:
"I bathed," "I built," "I listened," "I looked."
Those verbs show people actively participating
in human life and having agency,
that even amid oppression and dehumanization,
these people were still building and listening and looking.
And then in the latter part of the poem,
there are adjectives that in other poems
might be used pejoratively,
like "muddy" and "dusky,"
that are linked with other adjectives,
"golden," "ancient,"
that encourage us to perceive them
in a far more positive light.
So, darkness and brownness are seen
as lustrous and valuable and revered,
and I know that some of you will say,
"Oh, you're over-reading the poem.
"Hughes didn't mean any of this stuff,"
to which I say it doesn't matter.
These are still interesting and cool uses of language.
Although as it happens, I'm not over-reading it.
Anyway, let's look at one more poem, Harlem,
written in 1951.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
The "dream" here is likely a version of the American Dream,
a dream, that at the time Hughes wrote the poem,
was still denied to most African Americans.
And in that sense, it's kind of optimistic
that Hughes uses the term "deferred"
rather than like "destroyed" or "forbidden."
There's also a great moment earlier
in that same book of poems in which Hughes writes,
"Good morning Daddy, ain't you heard,
"the boogie woogie rumble of a dream deferred,"
which uses the conventions of blues music
to associate the deferral of the dream
with like a "boogie woogie rumble,"
but the imagery in this poem is very negative.
It often takes things that are sweet,
and then makes them horrifying.
You've got dried raisins, running sores,
I guess sores aren't that sweet,
but you do have crusty sweets.
Even the verbs are negative,
"dry," "fester," "stink," "crust," "sag,"
and that works against any real optimism.
This is all made even more interesting and complicated
by the fact that the poem sounds like a nursery rhyme.
It has neat, perfect one-syllable rhymes
like "sun" and "run,"
"meat" and "sweet,"
but then you have the layout of the poem,
which resists conventional stanzas,
and that troubles the simplicity here.
Also, the rhythm of the poem is always changing.
Like this isn't straight iambic pentameter
or anything like that,
and that makes it hard to build into a comfortable pace
as the reader.
And then there's that last line,
"Or does it explode?"
which from a meter perspective,
is totally fascinating
because there's a stress on every single syllable.
Or
does
it
explode?
I don't want to get too lit-critty on you,
but it's like the last line itself
is kind of trying to explode
because there's no break, no relief.
So, the rhymes make it sound harmless,
like it's from a children's book,
but the imagery and rhythm tell another,
much more barbed story.
And this is definitely one of Hughes' more political poems.
He's warning that if circumstances don't change,
there might be dangerous consequences.
This poem preceded the bulk of the Civil Rights Movement,
but it suggests that withholding true equality
has real risks and real costs to everyone in a social order.
There's so many other great Langston Hughes poems
that we don't have time to discuss like Dream Boogie,
I, Too,
Dream Variations,
Theme for English B.
I wanna share just one more with you,
no lit-crit or anything,
just the poem.
Folks I'm telling you,
birthing is hard and dying is mean,
so get yourself a little lovin',
in between.
See, sometimes literature's
just in the business of providing good advice.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next week.
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(upbeat music)