The Poetry of Langston Hughes 419
NOTES
- Wright, “The Big Sea,” in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present,ed.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 21. Comparing
Hughes to Theodore Dreiser, Wright observed that both writers undertook the crucial
task of “freeing American literary expression from the restrictions of Puritanism” (21). - Baldwin, “Sermons and Blues,” review of Selected Poems,by Langston Hughes, New
York Times Book Review,29 March 1959, 6. - Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays(Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1982), 4. - Louis Budd, “The American Background,” in The Cambridge Companion to
American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–46. The concept of realism surfaced again in the
1920s, when a generation of journalists—H.L. Mencken, John Macy, Van Wyck Brooks,
Ludwig Lewisohn, Lewis Mumford, and Randolph Bourne, to name a few—probed the
social purpose of literature and lavished praise on previously neglected artists, such as
Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and the late Howells, who had been critical of America’s
social and economic values. In 1930 Vernon Louis Parrington published The Beginnings of
Critical Realism in America: 1860–1920,an influential analysis that roundly criticized
writers who were too committed to narrowly “belletristic” aspects of literature. Parrington
was, in turn, condemned to obscurity by critics like Lionel Trilling, who sharply criticized
his literary nationalism and his insistence that literature should appeal to a popular
constituency. More recently, at least since the publication of Warner Berthoff’s Ferment of
Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919in 1965, a number of revisionary studies have
explored the social construction of American realism: Sundquist; Amy Kaplan, The Social
Construction of American Realism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and
Michael Anesko, “Recent Critical Approaches,” in Pizer, 77–94. - Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953). Auerbach’s helpful,
systematic account of the emergence of modern realist fiction identifies four criteria of
realism as a literary method: detailed description of everyday occurrences; serious
treatment of “socially inferior groups” as subject matter for existential representation
(491); belief in the capacity of language to reveal truths about the phenomenal world; and
portrayal of the individual’s destiny in both a particular social hierarchy and a broader
historical context. - In a useful account of the diverse approaches undertaken by modern American
poets, Cary Nelson discusses “partly forgotten poetry—including black poetry, poetry by
women, the poetry of popular song, and the poetry of social mass movements—thereby
giving those texts new connotations appropriate to our time” (Repression and Recovery:
Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 [Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], 22–3). But his study is primarily historical: he gives
no extended formal analyses and—aside from remarking that “traditional forms continued
to do vital cultural work” throughout the modern period (23)—tells us little about the
poetics of realism. - See Jonathan Arac, “Rhetoric and Realism; or, Marxism, Deconstruction, and the
Novel,” in Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical