Of course, the events taking place in Hughes’s personal life affected his poetry. His childhood and adolescence were characterized by his parents’ split, discrimination, and world events that most likely had a direct impact on his life (“Langston Hughes”). “The first area found Hughes dwelling on isolation, despair, suicide, and the like--conventional themes for a young, romantic poet, to be sure, but notions strongly felt by Hughes personally as he struggled to overcome the effect of his father’s desertion and his mother’s flighty compromise of her relationship to her son” (Rampersad 6). Hughes’s family troubles often affected the underlying themes of his poems. “The calm,/Cool face of the river/Asked me for a kiss” (Hughes). This poem, as
