The Poetry of Langston Hughes 397nineteenth century, in North America the movement emerged in full force
only with Howells’s advocacy in the nineties.^4
Partly in response to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,theoretical descriptions
of realism in modern American fiction have proliferated in recent decades.^5
Yet little sustained, systematic analysis has been done on the formal
development of realism in the modern lyric.^6 Such neglect may be explained
in part by the fact that the realist movement was long excluded from accounts
of twentieth-century American poetry, because it was considered formally
without interest—a servile, transparent copying of the world.^7 The New
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,for example, defines realism solely
in contradistinction to the intensified perception, densely metaphorical style,
and artificiality of the lyric and adds that, “in a general sense, realistic poetry
may result from any down-to-earth opposition to what seem artificial rules
of versification or arbitrary restrictions on matter or diction.... The precepts
of realism are often considered inimical to the spirit of lyric poetry.”^8
The latent critical bias against realism was memorably addressed by
Georg Lukács, who in the late 1950s offered a surprising and useful
theoretical reappraisal that paid special attention to formal issues. In The
Meaning of Contemporary RealismLukács arrived at a description of literary
realism that helped readers bracket ideological content and focus instead on
innovations in language and method. One objection he raised to current
critical approaches to realism was that the political message of literature was
fast becoming the overriding preoccupation of reviewers; as a result, literary
standards were falling precipitously.^9 Another pressing concern was that
modernist tastes in the 1920s had led critics to neglect works that exhibited
the traditional mimetic techniques of realism. Criticism, according to
Lukács, was hindered by the unexamined belief that realism was always, by
definition, antithetical to modernism:
Let us begin by examining two prejudices. The first is typical of
much present-day bourgeois criticism. It is contained in the
proposition that the literature of “modernism,” of the avant-
garde, is the essentially modern literature. The traditional
techniques of realism, these critics assert, are inadequate, because
too superficial, to deal with the realities of our age. (13)Hughes’s poems raise questions about stultifying critical binarisms that
for years have pitted modern realism against modernist antirealism, tradition
against the avant-garde, political content against artistic form. As a poet,
Hughes constantly tries to illustrate how formal qualities may assist an act of