The Poetry of Langston Hughes 423- Although at this point in his career Baraka’s position is not entirely separatist,
insofar as he concedes that the blues can be “appreciated” by non-African Americans, what
comes across here is the inaccessibility of the blues to a Euro-American audience (The
Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader,ed. William J. Harris [New York: Thunder’s Mouth,
1991], 37). - For a discussion of Hughes’s repudiation of racial separatist accounts of African
American culture during the 1930s see Anthony Dawahare, “Langston Hughes’s Radical
Poetry and the End of Race,” Melus23, no. 3 (1998): 21–41. - Lawrence, Complete Poems,ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New
York: Penguin, 1994), 943. - For a discussion of the themes and figurative resources used to remember,
mythologize, and represent the war see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). - In the final, frequently anthologized version of the poem, the speaker recognizes
that the sentiments inspired by the “insidious mastery” of music betray him even as he
helplessly yields to them, “till the heart of me weeps to belong / To the old Sunday
evenings at home” (Lawrence, Complete Poems,148). - Ben Arnold, Music and War: A Research and Information Guide(New York: Garland,
1993), 135. Arnold writes that “the concert life naturally changed, particularly in the Allied
countries, where German music had been so widespread. In Great Britain, all German music
was at first banned outright.... Musicians performed more music by native composers in
France, England, and America than before the war” (135). See also Barbara L. Tischler,
“World War I and the Challenge of 100% Americanism,” in An American Music: The Search
for an American Musical Identity(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 68–91. - Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 267. - Lawrence’s statement sheds some light on “Piano”: “Every people is polarized in
some particular locality, which is home, the homeland.... The Island of Great Britain had
a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people.
For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? And what if
England dies?” (Studies in Classic American Literature[New York: Doubleday, 1953], 16). - The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941,ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1950), 180. - Pound, Diptych Rome-London(New York: New Directions, 1994), 40.
- The Bridge,in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane,ed. Marc Simon (New York: Live-
right, 1993), 98–9. - The Auroras of Autumn,in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens(New York:
Vintage, 1982), 415. Helen Vendler suggests that “the source of the disgust for the father-
impresario seems to be Stevens’ revulsion against that deliberate primitivism of his own ...
which sets itself to conjure up negresses, guitarists, and the ‘unherded herds’ of ox-like
freed men, all in a vain attempt to reproduce on an ignorant and one-stringed instrument
the sophisticated chaos of the self” (On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969], 252). - Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909–1917,ed. Christopher Ricks (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 13, 17, 62. - North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10.