The Poetry of Langston Hughes 421freedom.... With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more
and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the
Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval
America to modern” (“The New Negro,” in The New Negro[New York: Atheneum, 1992],
6).
- Hughes did not use these italics until 1949, when the poem appeared in the
collection One-Way Ticket.But he did use quotation marks in 1931, when it was published
in Dear Lovely Death. - “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot,ed. Frank Kermode
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 177. For a discussion of Hughes’s early
exposure to black music see Steven Tracy, “To the Tune of Those Weary Blues,” in Gates,
69–93. Tracy observes that during his childhood (from about 1902 to 1915) Hughes would
have heard ballads, reels, and the “crude blues” of an older man like Henry Thomas; that
the blues shouter Big Joe Turner led blues singers through the streets of Kansas City
during the late 1910s and early 1920s; and that, although early blues was often
accompanied by crude homemade instruments, orchestral-type blues was already
emerging during the 1910s. - For a discussion of Hughes’s folk sources and references to blues structure, themes,
and imagery, and for a useful bibliography on jazz and blues, see Steven Tracy, Langston
Hughes and the Blues(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). For other insights into
Hughes’s use of the blues idiom see Patricia E. Bonner, “Cryin’ the Jazzy Blues and Livin’
Blue Jazz: Analyzing the Blues and Jazz Poetry of Langston Hughes,” West Georgia College
Review20 (1990): 15–28; Patricia Johns and Walter Farrell, “How Langston Hughes Used
the Blues,” Melus6 (1979): 55–63; and Edward E. Waldron, “The Blues Poetry of
Langston Hughes,” Negro American Literature Forum5 (1971): 140–9. - Rampersad insists that we take a revisionary look at Hughes’s aesthetic as having
been shaped by his recognition of a link between poetry and black music; he claims that
Fine Clothes to the Jew,Hughes’s least successful volume, marks the height of his creative
originality (“Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew,”in Gates, 54). Rampersad’s monumental
biography of Hughes, as well as his and Roessel’s recent edition of the Collected Poems,has
also contributed to the renewed interest in Hughes’s poetry. For an illuminating review of
the Collected Poemsthat characterizes Hughes’s poems in light of four main attributes—his
poetics of “announced ... [but] cryptic reciprocity,” his “idiosyncrasy of personal identity,”
his inveterate sociality, and his humorous irony—see Helen Vendler, “The Unweary
Blues,” New Republic,6 March 1995, 37–42. - “I tried,” Hughes observes, “to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh
Street—gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn’t help
being sad sometimes. But gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going.... Like the
waves of the sea coming one after another, always one after another, like the earth moving
around the sun, night, day—night, day-night, day—forever, so is the undertow of Black
music with its rhythm that never betrays you, its strength like the beat of the human heart,
its humor, and its rooted power” (The Big Sea,2d ed. [New York: Hill and Wang, 1993],
215). - Quoted in Shelby Steele, “The Content of His Character,” New Republic,1 March
1999, 30. - Ellison, Shadow and Act(New York: Vintage, 1995), 58–9.
- R. Baxter Miller argues that the blues performance in “The Weary Blues”