395In 1940 Richard Wright, praising Langston Hughes’s contribution to the
development of modern American literature, observed that Hughes’s
“realistic position” had become the “dominant outlook of all those Negro
writers who have something to say.”^1 Nineteen years later James Baldwin
faulted Hughes for failing to follow through consistently on the artistic
premises laid out in his early verse. The problem with his unsuccessful
poems, Baldwin said, was that they “take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity
in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of experience.” In succumbing
to the idiomatic demands of a sociological perspective—the pressure, that is,
to “hold the experience outside him”—they did not fulfill an essential
criterion of Baldwin’s realism, namely, the evocation of a point of view that
stands “within the experience and outside it at the same time.” To argue his
point, Baldwin cited the last line of a jazz poem by Hughes called “Dream
Boogie,” which first appeared as part of Montage of a Dream Deferredin 1951.
“Hughes,” said Baldwin, “knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics,
what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he
has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become
clear and overwhelming. ‘Hey, pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!’ conveys much more
on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to
be.”^2
The main criticism Baldwin raises against jazz poems like “Dream
ANITA PATTERSONJazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric:
The Poetry of Langston Hughes
FromModern Language Quarterly, Vol 61, No. 4 (December 2000). © 2000 University of
Washington.