Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1

(^422) Anita Patterson
dramatizes several actions, including black self-affirmation, a remaking of the black self-
image, and Hughes’s transcendence of racial stereotypes through lyric discourse (The Art
and Imagination of Langston Hughes[Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989], 55).
My discussion suggests, on the contrary, that the figurative complexity of Hughes’s poem
helps him arrive at a clarifying, critical perspective on the folk tradition.



  1. Hughes remarked that “it was a poem about a working man who sang the blues all
    night and then went to bed and slept like a rock. That was all” (Big Sea,215).

  2. Leavis, “Mass Civilization and Minority Culture,” in For Continuity(Cambridge:
    Minority, 1933), 16–8; Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” in Selected Essays(New York: Harcourt, Brace
    and World, 1960), 407. “In an interesting essay in the volume of Essays on the Depopulation
    of Melanesia,”Eliot writes, “the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers adduced evidence which has
    led him to believe that the natives of that unfortunate archipelago are dying out principally
    for the reason that ‘Civilization’ forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life.
    They are dying from pure boredom. When every theatre has been replaced by 100
    cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when
    every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has
    made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loud-speaker, when
    applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life
    as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized
    world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians” (407–8).

  3. Eliot, The Waste Land,in Collected Poems, 1909–1962(New York: Harcourt Brace,
    1963), 62; hereafter cited as WL.

  4. “The question of racial terror,” Gilroy suggests, “always remains in view when
    these modernisms are discussed because their imaginative proximity to terror is their
    inaugural experience.... Though they were unspeakable, these terrors were not
    inexpressible, and ... residual traces of their necessarily painful expression still contribute
    to historical memories inscribed and incorporated into the volatile core of Afro-Atlantic
    cultural creation.... The topos of unsayability produced from the slaves’ experiences of
    racial terror ... can be used to challenge the privileged conceptions of both language and
    writing as preeminent expressions of human consciousness” (The Black Atlantic: Modernity
    and Double Consciousness[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 73–4).

  5. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk,in Writings,ed. Nathan Huggins (New York:
    Library of America, 1986), 542–3.

  6. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a polemical essay published in the
    Nationin 1926, Hughes emphasizes his “racial individuality” as a poet. But even here he
    implies that knowledge of traditional prosody would have helped him acquire an
    interpretive, distanced perspective on folk resources: the African American artist, he says,
    must learn to “interest himself in interpretingthe beauty of his own people” (Within the
    Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the
    Present,ed. Angelyn Mitchell [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994], 55–6).

  7. In the 1960s Baraka advocated a racial separatist approach to African American
    music. Many of his essays written in 1965, for example, affirm nineteenth-century racialist
    ideas of black manifest destiny and propose the formation of a black nation through a
    cultural consciousness flowing from the soul of the artist: “The Black Man must realize
    himself as Black. And idealize and aspire to that ... The Black Artist’s role in America is to
    aid the destruction of America as we know it” (Home: Social Essays[New York: Morrow,
    1966], 248, 252).

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