(^420) Anita Patterson
Theory,ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1987), 161.
- Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1016. - “If every mediocre product of socialist realism is to be hailed as a masterpiece,”
Lukács writes, “confusion will be worse confounded. My tertium daturis an objective
critical appraisal of the very real innovations which we owe to socialist realism. In exposing
literary mediocrity, and criticizing theoretical dogmatism, I am trying to ensure that the
creative aspects of this new realism will be more clearly understood” (The Meaning of
Contemporary Realism,trans. John Mander and Necke Mander [London: Merlin, 1963],
11). - The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel
(New York: Knopf, 1994), 127; hereafter cited as CP. - See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). - See, e.g., W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study(1899; rpt. New
York: Schocken, 1967); Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration(1918; rpt. New
York: Russell and Russell, 1969); Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration during the War(1920;
rpt. New York: Arno, 1969); Louise Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of
Recent Migrations to Northern Cities(New York: Columbia University Press; London: King
and Son, 1930); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1932); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of
Negro Life in a Northern City(1945; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962); and
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,2 vols.
(1945; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1962). For a useful overview of the vast literature
on the Great Migration see Joe Trotter, “Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A
Review of the Literature,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions
of Race, Class, and Gender,ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991), 1–21. - Friedrich argues, on the evidence of poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé,
and others, that “modern poetry, in its dissonances, is obeying a law of its style. And this
law ... is, in turn, obeying the historical situation of the modern mind, which, because of
the excessive imperiling of its freedom, has an excessive passion for freedom” (The
Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century,trans.
Joachim Neugroschel [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974], 168). Cf.
Paul de Man’s claim that a definitively “modern” poet must reject the burdensome
assumption that artists convey meaning, since it poses a limit on expressive freedom and
denies “the conception of language as the act of an autonomous self” (“Lyric and
Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971], 171). - Johnson, “How Much Is Migration a Flight from Persecution?” Opportunity,
September 1923, 272–5. - Whereas in 1930 Hughes used the image of flight ironically, juxtaposing the
poem’s title with the closing image of a hanged black man swinging in a tree, in 1925
Locke had used a similar image to mythologize the modernizing effects of migration: “The
wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be
explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic