The Poetry of Langston Hughes 409German music; in England, France, and America musicians were encouraged
to perform the works of “native” composers.^36 In the first half of the
nineteenth century chamber music had gradually been moved out of
domestic spaces and salons into public performance halls. “Personality,”
observes James H. Johnson, “thrust itself to center stage in the romantic
decades.”^37
Lawrence and Hughes both questioned popular notions of racial
authenticity in music. Like Hughes’s “Weary Blues,” Lawrence’s “Piano”
expresses ambivalence toward the expressive and perceptual constraints of
the “polarization” of peoples in “particular localit[ies].”^38 Hughes was
concerned to stand, as it were, both inside and outside the blues and
figuratively to imply his own motives for moving away from the rich but
ultimately constraining formulas of traditional blues lyrics. Lawrence’s stance
is similar, insofar as his speaker affirms, with great affection, the distinctive
musical heritages of nations while he conveys the horrifying irony that such
seemingly benign cultural distinctions would, in the end, be used as a
justification for war. By upholding both the distinctiveness and the
universality of musical experience, both poets suggest that music, in the
words of Theodor Adorno, “more than any other artistic medium, expresses
the national principle’s antinomies” (quoted in Gilroy, 72).
Hughes’s technically self-conscious approach to realism in the lyric, his
prosodic resistance to separatist paradigms, and his interest in the history and
irreducible hybridity of African American culture are aspects of his lyric
practice that he shared with his American modernist contemporaries. Pound’s
1920 poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,for example, may be said to anticipate
Hughes’s “Weary Blues,” since it also confronts the problem of realism in the
lyric. Although Pound keeps references to social setting and details to a bare
minimum in the poem, his interest in finding a modern poetic equivalent to
Henry James’s realism is evident in a 1922 letter to Felix Schelling, in which
Pound calls his poem “an attempt to condense the James novel.”^39 Morever,
like Hughes, Pound uses the image of a piano to explore how modern art has
come dangerously close to the mass-produced conformity, planned
obsolescence, and rapid replacement associated with fashion. The pianola
metonymically represents the forces of mass production:
The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola “replaces”
Sappho’s barbitos.^40