Modern American Poetry

The Poetry of Langston Hughes 419

NOTES

1. 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).


2. Baldwin, “Sermons and Blues,” review of Selected Poems,by Langston Hughes, New
   York Times Book Review,29 March 1959, 6.


3. Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays(Baltimore, Md.: Johns
   Hopkins University Press, 1982), 4.


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.


5. 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.


6. 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.


7. See Jonathan Arac, “Rhetoric and Realism; or, Marxism, Deconstruction, and the
   Novel,” in Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical