Culture Thursday: The poetry of Langston Hughes

Posted by Liberal Librarian February 15, 2024

Culture Thursday: The poetry of Langston Hughes

Well, hello Barflies.

Back yonder when Joe Biden won the presidency, I made some mad comment that now we could post more feline open threads, because things were coming up roses.

Oh. Hah.

But I do want to broaden our content to more than politics, important as that is. Why? Because for one y'all talk about whatever y'all want to talk about anyway. We don't need a specific thread for that. And secondly, one cannot live by one obsession alone. Monomania leads to, well, mania.

So today we debut a new feature: Culture Thursdays. This will join our True Crime Fridays and our Weekend Self-care as an opportunity to enjoy life beyond the political hustings.

In these threads I want to examine some aspect of culture or history which interests me. I also take requests for things you would like to see featured.

Since I'm a writer and dilletante poet, and it's Black History Month, today we shall revel in the poetry of Langston Hughes.

Hughes was a product of that florescence which was the Harlem Renaissance. In the hothouse atmosphere of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, a whole new literature emerged, delineating the Black American experience in a country which was not kind to that community. These writers, artists, and musicians experienced the pain of racism and segregation every day. They transmuted that hurt into art of the most sublime sort. And Langston Hughes was the poet laureate of that time. He was the first Black poet to enter the American canon, and blazed the trail for the likes of Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni.

But of course, Hughes wasn't just a "Black" poet. His work forced the door open to recognize that Black American artists were as "American" as their white counterparts. His poetry took the Black experience and did what all great art does: make it universal, applicable to the wider culture.

Without further ado, the poet.