Langston Hughes & the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Literature 215

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In which John Green teaches you about the poetry of Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes was a poet and playwright in the first half of the 20th century, and he was involved in the Harlem Renaissance, which was a cultural movement among African Americans of the time that produced all kinds of great works in literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and other areas. The Harlem Renaissance mainly happened in Harlem, the traditionally black neighborhood in upper Manhattan in New York City. Langston Hughes was primarily known as a poet, but he was involved deeply in the movement itself as well. John will teach you a bit about Hughes's background, and he'll examine a few of his best known poems.

- 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)