Modern American Poetry

(^416) Anita Patterson
The Improvisations—coming at a time when I was trying to
remain firm
at great cost—I had recourse to the expedient of letting life go
completely in order to live in the world of my choice....
The virtue of the improvisations is their placement in a world of
new values—
their fault is their dislocation of
sense, often complete.^55
The convergence between Hughes’s techniques and those of Williams, Eliot,
and others discloses the historical knowledge that informs the impulse
toward formal experiment and improvisation in the modernist lyric.
At the beginning of this essay we saw Baldwin criticize Hughes’s late
jazz poem, “Dream Boogie,” for falling short of the standards of realism. I
want to conclude by suggesting that, Baldwin’s criticisms notwithstanding,
the spirit of formal innovation in “Dream Boogie” is entirely in keeping with
Hughes’s earlier realism in poems such as “Flight.”
“Dream Boogie” is far more modernist than “Flight,” since it manifests
a sustained, figurative effort to move away from the realist duties of
verisimilitude. It avoids familiar reference to historical contexts; it twists
away from language toward abstract sequences of sound; and it brings us into
a discursive world in which speech and perception have been broken down
into fragments. Insofar as the speaker touches on realities, his treatment of
them is almost wholly nondescriptive:
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
“You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a—
You think
It’s a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath
like a—