|
Langston Hughes, My Favorite Music Poet
Langston Hughes, the multifaceted writer whose personal contradictions compel nearly as much attention as his consistent poetic voice, stood at the center of the Harlem Renaissance while spending much of that period studying in Pennsylvania at Lincoln University. Acclaimed as a poet since the eighth grade, Hughes saw his poems in "Opportunity" before finishing high school, and Alfred A. Knopf published "The Weary Blues," his first book of poetry, on the eve of his departure from New York for Lincoln.
Hughes the poet was an heir to the open democracy of Walt Whitman, the concerns of the common man of Carl Sandburg, and the quest for linguistic authenticity of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. He felt in the blues the sadness of African American lives with their core of dark humor, working the language of rural and lower-class, urban people into the statement and sharp turns of his song-inspired verse in "The Weary Blues" (1926).
|
