A Study Guide (New Edition) for Langston Hughes's "Harlem"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for Langston Hughes's "Harlem", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867887

Book preview

17

Harlem

Langston Hughes

1951

Introduction

Harlem is a poem by Langston Hughes, the founding father of jazz poetry, an architect of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the major African American poets of the twentieth century. It first appeared in his collection Montage of a Dream Deferred, published in 1951 and currently out of print; Hughes considered this a book-length poem of which Harlem was one of many parts. It was republished—under a new title, Dream Deferred—in a later collection, The Panther & the Lash, issued in 1967. This collection is still in print. The poem also appears, along with the entirety of the original Montage, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, volume 3, published in 2001 by the University of Missouri. It is one of his most celebrated poems and has been anthologized many times.

The poem, only eleven lines long, considers various possible outcomes when a dream is postponed. The collection in which it originally appeared, like much of Hughes's work, was overt in its treatment of racial injustice and the need for a cultural transformation in America, and the dream in question is widely interpreted as one of racial equality and freedom. Harlem, unlike many other poems in Montage of a Dream Deferred, does not use the language of jazz and bebop, and it concludes with a stark warning about the possibility of violence in a climate of constant political and societal oppression. The poem's third line provided the title for A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry's famous 1959 play.

Author Biography

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His mother, Carrie Langston, was a schoolteacher and aspiring actress who enjoyed reciting from plays and her own poetry. His father, James Hughes, had been prevented from becoming a