Modern American Poetry

(^400) Anita Patterson
Because self-referentiality penetrates a privileged arena, there is also the
suggestion of trespass: the poet’s act is described in terms that bring to mind a
man in flight, a man accused of rape. Hughes’s exhilarating discovery of
freedom through formal modes of expression—metaphors rich in ambiguity,
the distancing effects and pleasures of rhyme and writerly italicization, the
metrical swing of his verse—is counterpointed by an awareness that such
freedom implicates him in the history he relates. Hughes’s use of italics, for
example, makes the victim’s words echo, as if lifted from a realist novel about
a lynching that was written for a mass audience.^16 The device reminds us that,
by adopting the lyric as his preferred genre, Hughes has aligned himself with
other avant-garde artists in refusing to satisfy the raging market demand for
sensationalist fiction that exacerbated a mass audience’s tendency toward
escapism. Even as his poem resists such a flight from reality, however, Hughes
also insists on his freedom as an artist: the freedom, that is, to work continually
at formal experimentation and to transcend the all-determining, muddy
historical contingencies that fatally distort perception.
Hughes’s gesture toward modernist innovation—his veiled reference to
an avant-garde flight from verisimilitude—ultimately serves the ends of his
realism, insofar as it raises the reader’s awareness of the post-emancipation
context of the lyric. The violent historical developments that caused the
Great Migration and spurred Hughes’s engagement with formal questions
are linked to the rhythmic cadences of “Flight” by the verb swing,at the end
of the poem: the neat succession of rhythms that fall (“Hurry! Black boy,
hurry!”) and rise again (“They’ll swing you to a tree”) ominously dramatizes
the swinging motion of the hanged man’s body.
“Flight” questions familiar definitions of literary realism, as well as the
idea that Hughes’s realist commitments foreclose the possibility of
modernism. At the same time that he tries to document the violent
conditions that shaped the emergence of modern African American poetry,
Hughes also invites us to consider how, and why, the poet’s manipulation of
his medium expresses artistic freedom from the contingencies he depicts. In
the end he shows us that the nineteenth-century realist goal of transparent
verisimilitude is unattainable in the modern lyric. Such figurative complexity
highlights a modernist tendency in Hughes’s realism.
“THEWEARYBLUES”:
HUGHES’SCRITIQUE OFBLACKCULTURALNATIONALISM
To confer shape on what Eliot described as the “immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” Hughes turned not to