Modern American Poetry

The Poetry of Langston Hughes 407

Forty years before the Black Arts movement Hughes was writing poems that
examined the tragic implications of racial separatist logic. As “The Weary
Blues” shows, it would have been impossible for him to write completely in
accordance with the verbal constraints of the folk tradition: to do so would
have resulted in an endlessly mechanical recapitulation of the racial terror of
slavery. Viewed in these terms, Hughes’s repudiation of racialist ideas about
culture in poems written during the 1920s anticipates the positions he
explored in his so-called radical poetry, written between 1932 and 1938.^32

HUGHES AND THEMODERNISTCRITIQUE OFROMANTICNATIONALISM

Hughes’s resistance to separatist descriptions of African American culture is,
in certain respects, strikingly similar to the critique of romantic nationalism
undertaken by many of his modernist contemporaries, both in the United
States and in Europe. D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace
Stevens, Hart Crane, and others wrote poems in which they tried to come to
terms with the difficult necessity of cross-cultural identification. Many of
these poems centered on the changing nature of musical experience and the
devastating, far-reaching consequences of European nationalism that
culminated in the Great War.
An early draft of Lawrence’s “Piano,” which first appeared in New
Poemsin 1918, explores how the speaker’s response to Hungarian music
reflects the historical causes of the war. Like Hughes, Lawrence tried to show
how traces of history were ceaselessly echoed in nineteenth-century musical
forms. But whereas Hughes was primarily concerned with illustrating the
American legacy of racial violence that shaped musical forms such as swing
and the blues, Lawrence confronted the legacy of romanticism in Europe:

Somewhere beneath that piano’s superb sleek black

Must hide my mother’s piano, little and brown, with the back

That stood close to the wall, and the front’s faded silk, both torn,

And the keys with little hollows, that my mother’s fingers had worn.

Softly, in the shadows, a woman is singing to me

Quietly, through the years I have crept back to see

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the shaking strings

Pressing the little poised feet of the mother who smiles as she sings.

The full throated woman has chosen a winning, living song

And surely the heart that is in me must belong