Modern American Poetry

(^418) Anita Patterson
African American music, it also remains anchored in the particularities of its
own time and place, since it is essentially about the dangers posed to
American society as a whole when these truths are not brought to light in the
realm of art. The speaker’s ambivalence toward the project of meaningful
representation makes sense only when we realize that the poem takes on a
subject that Adorno systematically elaborated in his celebrated diatribe
against the popular culture industry: the poem figuratively suggests a
deplorable lack of conscious perception on the part of many Euro-Americans
who considered themselves avid jazz fans.
Like Adorno, Hughes in “Dream Boogie” suggests that too many
people who listened to jazz did not hear the seriousness of its emotional
message and were not aware of the violent historical conditions out of which
the impulse to formal innovation emerged. Instead many Americans
regarded jazz merely as a pleasant background for conversation or a happy
accompaniment to dancing.^56 The italicized question addressed to the Euro-
American reader marks a crucial transition from the lyric’s effort to mime
violence (that is, from its performance of a nonrepresentational, violent
motion of beating measured feet) to an all-out confrontation with meanings
on the verge of verbal explicitness. The italics themselves highlight the social
and emotional pressure exerted on the speaker when he tries to say that the
historical implications of jazz as an art form—a form rooted in the traumatic
postemancipation history of lynching and migration—were anything but
happy; they express the speaker’s frustration at the listener’s inability to hear
the social and emotional truths conveyed by the music.^57
Hughes’s experiments with realism in the lyric help us question the
distinction between realism and the avant-garde in accounts of transatlantic
modernism. Like Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and other twentieth-century
American poets, Hughes demonstrated that certain modernist styles were
created in response to historical conditions and addressed the danger posed
by modernity to artistic freedom. Leo Bersani once said that “the realistic
novel gives us an image of social fragmentation contained within the order
of significant form—and it thereby suggests that the chaotic fragments are
somehow socially viable and morally redeemable” (quoted in Anesko, 83),
and this claim also seems an apt description of Hughes’s poetic evocation of
jazz. Insofar as his lyrics transcend frontiers of consciousness and culture,
they fulfill a cherished criterion of modernism, in turn, serves the moral ends
of realism by allowing him to encompass, order, and preserve fragments of
history.