Modern American Poetry

The Poetry of Langston Hughes 417

What did I say?

Sure,

I’m happy!

Take it away!

Hey, pop!

Re-bop!

Mop!

Y-e-a-h!(CP,388)

Like many works written by his avant-garde contemporaries, Hughes’s
poem is not designed to meet our interpretive expectations; it contains no
meaning that, as Eliot says, would readily satisfy a “habit” of the reader (UP,
151). According to Eliot, modern poems are sometimes intended primarily
to amplify the reader’s experience of the intensity of feeling that results from
the poet’s movement toward ideas at the “frontiers of consciousness,” where
meanings have not yet been put into words. In “The Music of Poetry” he
writes: “We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem in a
language of which we understand no word.... If, as we are aware, only a part
of the meaning can be conveyed by paraphrase, that is because the poet is
occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though
meanings still exist” (PP,22).
In “Dream Boogie” Hughes’s idiom is modernist in Eliot’s sense: the
lyric’s form embodies an effort to move beyond the frontiers of social
consciousness and expression. The line breaks; the arrangement of words on
the page, flush left and flush right; and the use of italics are stylistic elements
that show the ambivalence and animosity of an African American speaker
trying to explain the meaning of the music to a Euro-American listener. The
rhetorical question “You think / It’s a happy beat?”has the visual effect of
stretching, tonally inflecting, and thereby extending the meaning of the
trope to include its own correct response. The poem pauses, calling
attention to its own act of figuration and to the poet’s act of writing.
Hughes’s modernist predilection for experimental forms that allegorize the
struggle for and against verisimilitude, and his constant awareness of the
constraints of language as an artistic medium, is central to his practice as a
realist poet.
Although “Dream Boogie” is modernist insofar as it illustrates an effort
to escape from historical referentiality and refuses to state explicitly the
bitter social truths encoded in what Baldwin calls the “hieroglyphics” of