Langston Hughes

Improved Essays
Dream Variations is a poem written by Langston Hughes... In his poem, Langston Hughes wishes for an untroubled life away from color harassment and racial discrimination... The title of the poem mentions Langston Hughes’s main themes, that is, dreams, particularly the dreams of African Americans...Langston Hughes tells that this poem is dedicated to the workers, roustabouts and singers, and job hunters...In the poem, Hughes’s embraces and tries to embrace, day and night, light and dark, white and black...

The poem, Dream Variation, includes two stanzas, the first of nine lines and the second of eight... The first stanza depicts his dream and in the second stanza, the poet is dreaming subsequent to a long day's hard work, and this dream is imperfect...

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Change in Views Overtime Langston Hughes had a rather difficult life in post-war United States, as with the United States being a rather racist society, excluding and handicapping all races besides white. Hughes, being partially African American, White American, and Native American, Hughes experienced the worst of the worlds firsthand. He was under the stereotypes all the time, it be African American stereotypes, or Native American stereotypes. As a result of this racism he endured, Hughes poems was directed towards American society and towards the ruined dreams of people that were suppressed by the racism.…

    • 355 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen are two major figures with very similar themes within their poems. The two early twentieth century authors delve into their writings during the Harlem Renaissance. During this time, African Americans were facing difficult challenges of their African heritage while still wanting to be apart of and accepted in the predominately white society. Between the two authors, they shared a common goal of racial equality and also supplying the residents of Harlem, New York an awareness of African American’s everyday lives. In both of their poems, “Yet Do I Marvel” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” it is proven to be true.…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes Salvation

    • 716 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Most of us could look back and reminisce about our lives when we were twelve years old. Twelve, being an age where responsibilities and making difficult decisions are ultimately obsolete for many of us. This was not the case for Langston Hughes. In Langston Hughes’s short story personal narrative “Salvation”, he vividly describes the struggles he faced when being saved one evening in church. A young man who lost his faith after trying to appease adult perceptions of faith with his young mind.…

    • 716 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Between 1860 and 1930, African Americans experienced continuous segregation and hatred from the Whites; in spite of this, as the African Americans migrated from the South to the North, they began to rapidly advance in not only cultural arts, but also in education. Before the dawning of the African Americans’ historical movement, they were forced to endure the adversities of slavery. Despite their lack of individualism and say, they continuously strived to prosper in their discriminative society and eventually led their own race to freedom. The Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic movement that kindled a novel Black identity, triggered the African Americans’ motivation to personally articulate their beliefs through paintings that are…

    • 1065 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes Diction

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages

    A piece of poetry can be interpreted in different ways depending on who is looking at it. Poet, Langston Hughes, understands that. He is a member of the Harlem Renaissance and the first African American to establish a profession with literary works. Hughes uses dark diction, somber imagery, and a gloomy tone in “The Dream Keeper”, “Dreams”, and “Dream Deferred” in order to convey the melancholy a person experiences from the lose of a dream. Dark diction is an effective manner to convey the melancholy of a lost hope and dream.…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes Influences

    • 1641 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Langston Hughes, who is a dominant poet of the Harlem Renaissance, has been significantly influenced by both the sounds and traditions of the growing blues and jazz community. The Harlem Renaissance is a 1920’s movement in Harlem, New York that sparked an increased growth in the art scene/community, largely seen in music, literature, and fashion. Considering Hughes such a strong advocator and lover of both jazz and blues music, he then began to write poetry in a style which was very heavily influenced by these two musical styles. Because of this, he was one of the first poets to thrive in this prospering genre of jazz poetry, a literary genre where poetry is based around jazz and incorporates a variety of the same forms, rhythms, and sounds…

    • 1641 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes Legacy

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Langston’s Legacy The American Voice is the art and literature which help ’s continue to expand and evolve America’s culture. There are hundreds of authors and artists who have contributed their own works and unique styles to this “Voice”. As well as throughout the history of this nation, there have been events which further shaped this country; for example, the Harlem Renaissance and the time period of African-Americans trying to help find their own cultural identity. Langston Hughes was an author who helped form the American Voice by setting the precedent for African American civil rights works and launching the Harlem Renaissance into full effect.…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes is a well-known African American Poet. Hughes had many literary talents he wrote short stories, novel, screenplays, plays, autobiographer, and children’s books. Hughes also had a very powerful voice which encourages many people to follow him. Langston devoted a lot of his literatures to the economics, politicians, and social issues that were going in the world. He was also a very important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.…

    • 1347 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In "I, Too," Langston Hughes is obviously in conversation with the earlier poem, Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." Both poems explore the idea of American identity -- who and what is an American? What characterizes the people of this nation? The two poets, however, reach somewhat different conclusions in response to these questions. Whitman is known as the quintessential American poet, in part due to poems like this one.…

    • 680 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that started in New York City during World War I and continued into the 1930’s. It was an African American movement, which was also known as the “New Negro Movement”. Many African American’s were sick and tired of the way they were being treated by white Americans and used many forms of art to express and represent who they were and what was happening in their culture. The Jim Crow laws and white supremacy were becoming too much for many to handle, which is why the Harlem Renaissance had such major impact on society during this time period. The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of artists who came together to express their feelings using poetry, music, photography, literature and more.…

    • 1261 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Langston Hughes: A Harlem Man A quote by Langston Hughes says – “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose. (Hughes (1926))” As one of the most persistent figures, poets, during the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes’ work reached a wide range of viewers. He wanted to “express contemporary Harlem by borrowing from the ‘current of Afro-American popular music . . . jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop.’…

    • 2038 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Harlem Renaissance was a period of great poetic, narrative, and artistic revolution and enlightenment in early twentieth century New York. One of the more influential and fantastic writers of that period was James Mercer Langston Hughes, commonly known just as Langston Hughes. Hughes was an extremely talented writer, for he published novels, poems, biographies, plays, television shows, operas, and proses. Despite his abundance of skills, poetry was arguably Hughes’s most precious forte. Hughes did not grow up with an ideal childhood, and he utilizes some of those hardships in his writings.…

    • 1450 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech, was directly Langston Hughes and his poem Dream Variation directly influence King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech. Upon first glance, the poem’s title, plays on the themes of African American Dreams. Structurally the poem is seventeen lines and divided into two stanzas. Stanza one and two mirror each and compare day and night as a metaphor for race: white and black. The first four lines use imagery of the day and verbs to discuss the white workday in which the white man rules.…

    • 1880 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    While the speaker includes mostly perfect rhymes, he does not use these exclusively. At the close of the first stanza, for instance, the speaker breaks the consistent rhyme scheme for the first time by including an off-rhyme, “While night comes on gently, / Dark like me— / That is my dream!” (7-9). The words “me” and “dream” are slant rhymes, as they sound quite similar but they do not rhyme perfectly with one another. Because the previous rhymes are all perfect, masculine rhymes, the slight difference between the words “me” and “dream” creates an unfamiliar, harsh sound for readers.…

    • 1770 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Who am I? Where did I come from? What religion should I practice? Who is my God? These are questions that African Americans have yet to adequately answer.…

    • 1756 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays