Modern American Poetry

(^402) Anita Patterson
the lyric’s style affirms the individuality of both speaker and poet. The line
breaks rhythmically emphasize the importance of human desire and
possession (“miss,” “need,” “want,” “got”), Hughes’s unabashed embrace of
the oral tradition and a vernacular blues syntax (“Says miss that red clay”),
and the metrical freedom discovered through repeated pronominal self-
naming (“I”).
Hughes broke new ground in his poetry, partly because he saw that his
engagement with canonical texts and his interest in traditional English and
American prosody would provide a much-needed, clarifying distance from
the rich but potentially formulaic idioms he borrowed from African
American folk culture. Ellison made a comment that seems to encapsulate
Hughes’s efforts to establish a critical, intellectual perspective on the folk
tradition as a poetic resource:
The Negro American writer is also an heir of the human
experience which is literature, and this might well be more
important to him than his living folk tradition. For me, at least ...
the stability of the Negro American folk tradition became
precious as a result of an act of literary discovery.... For those who
are able to translate its meanings into wider, more precise
vocabularies it has much to offer indeed.^22
Hughes was well aware that, as a poet, he needed to come to terms with the
fundamental difference between blues language and poetic language. Despite
his devotion to the traditional African American folk idiom, in a number of
poems written during the 1920s he took a serious look at the artistic costs
and devastating emotional consequences of the strict expressive constraints
imposed by the blues.
In “The Weary Blues,” first published in 1925, Hughes expresses his
desire to encounter the idiomatic options raised by the blues as possibilities
that he was free to choose, not as habitual motions that he was compelled to
reiterate. The blues song has been framed by the mediating perspective of
the lyric speaker, who describes the “moan” of the “poor piano.” In contrast
to the speaker, who tries to put the meaning of the music into words, the
blues player conveys his feelings not so much with words as with the “lazy
sway” of his body:^23
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.