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Home · American Literature · Langston Hughes
Poet · Dramatist

Langston Hughes

1901–1967 · Joplin, Missouri

The poet who put blues and jazz rhythm into American verse and made Harlem its subject.

Harlem Renaissance · Jazz Poetry

Life & Background

Hughes was born in Missouri in 1901 and raised largely by his grandmother in Kansas after his parents separated; his father, who had left for Mexico in disgust at American racism, tried to steer him into engineering abroad. He wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers at eighteen on a train crossing the Mississippi to visit him. He spent a year at Columbia, worked as a merchant seaman to Africa and Europe, and washed dishes in Paris nightclubs. Working as a busboy in Washington he left poems by Vachel Lindsay's plate, and the publicity helped launch him. He became the most prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance and, unusually, sustained a career for four decades after it, writing poetry, plays, novels, columns, and the popular Simple stories. He was questioned by McCarthy's subcommittee in 1953. He died in New York in 1967.

The Weary Blues

The Weary Blues
1926
Plot summary

The poem describes a night on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, where the speaker hears a Black musician playing piano by the pale dull light of an old gas lamp. The player rocks back and forth, makes the poor piano moan with melody, and sings a blues about having nobody in all this world and deciding to put his troubles on the shelf. The piano moans and the singer's voice carries into the night; the song goes on until the stars go out and the moon with them. When it is over the musician goes to bed and sleeps like a rock or a man that's dead, while the tune echoes on in his head.

Literary analysis

The poem embeds an actual blues stanza inside a framing lyric, so the form enacts its argument: Black vernacular music is not raw material for poetry but is already the poem. Hughes's rhythms follow the syncopation and repetition of blues and, later, of bebop in Montage of a Dream Deferred, which is structured as a jazz suite. His manifesto The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) answers Black critics who wanted respectable subjects, declaring that the young Black artists intend to express their dark-skinned selves without fear or shame, and if white people or coloured people are displeased, it does not matter. The famous question of what happens to a dream deferred, from Harlem, supplied the title of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.

Why Hughes Matters

Hughes is the central poet of the Harlem Renaissance and the writer who most successfully made African American musical form into literary form, opening a line that runs through the Black Arts Movement to contemporary spoken word. His insistence on writing about ordinary working Black life, against pressure to present respectable subjects, is a standard case in debates about representation. Poems including I, Too, Harlem, and Mother to Son are permanent anthology fixtures.

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Key Facts

Discovered as a busboy
He left poems beside the poet Vachel Lindsay's dinner plate in a Washington hotel; Lindsay read them aloud that night.
The Racial Mountain
His 1926 essay defended the right of Black artists to write about ordinary Black life without apology.
Jazz and blues form
He built blues stanzas and later bebop structure directly into his verse, notably in Montage of a Dream Deferred.
A dream deferred
The line from Harlem gave Lorraine Hansberry the title of A Raisin in the Sun.

All Major Works

  • The Weary Blues1926
  • The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain1926
  • Fine Clothes to the Jew1927
  • Not Without Laughter1930
  • The Ways of White Folks1934
  • Montage of a Dream Deferred1951
  • Simple Speaks His Mind1950
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