Langston Hughes In The 1930s Essay Research

Langston Hughes In The 1930s Essay, Research Paper

James Smethurst

No portion of Hughes’s literary career has been more commonly

dismissed than that of the 1930s. Even many of Hughes’s admirers compare unfavorably his

writings of the 1930s to his work in other decades. In this view, Hughes’s 1930s efforts

in many different genres–including short and long fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, song

writing–largely sounded over and over the same ham-fisted didactic note, lacking the

lyric humanism and folk wit of his work in the 1920s, 1940s, and 1950s. This asserted

nadir of Hughes’s literary efforts is almost always related to his engagement with the

CPUSA.

That Hughes was, with the exception of Richard Wright, the black writer most identified

with the Communist Left during the 1930s is undeniable. Hughes’s frequent publication of

"revolutionary" poetry in the journals and press of the CPUSA, his activity in

Communist-initiated campaigns such as the drive to free the Scottsboro defendants and on

behalf of the Spanish Republic, his willingness to lend his name to Communist-led or

Communist-influenced organizations (e.g., the John Reed Clubs, the League of Struggle for

Negro Rights, the National Negro Congress, the League of Professional Groups for Foster

and Ford, the League of American Writers), and his public support of the Soviet Union

(including his signing of a statement in 1938 supporting the purges of the Old Bolsheviks

and others by Stalin) all marked him as an open member of the Communist Left–whether or

not he formally joined the CPUSA. As noted in chapter I, Hughes’s Left sympathies

antedated the Great Depression. But it is unquestionably true that Hughes’s participation

in the Left increased astronomically during the 1930s and had a marked impact on the form

and content (to use a favorite phrase of Left cultural critics of that time) of Hughes’s

poetry.

But, in fact, what is formally most interesting about Hughes’s poetry in the 1930s is

that the wide variety of voices, styles, and themes employed by Hughes in the late 1920s

and early 1930s and addressed to equally disparate audiences become largely unified by the

end of the decade in a manner that is crucial to the development of his later work. This

process of unification results in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) and, ultimately, Montage

of a Dream Deferred (1951), in which formerly distinct addresses and addressees are

combined to imagine a single audience and a single subject. Or, to draw on Bahktin’s

discussion of the novel, if a diversity of speakers and auditors could be said to be

retained by Hughes, this diversity is contained within a single volume in a dialogic

relation rather than in different volumes and journals speaking to different audiences.

The poetic voice that Hughes creates, unlike the voice established in most of the work of

Sterling Brown, is not that of the individual narratorial consciousness, but of a

simultaneously unitary and multiple urban community. While the persona of the

poet-narrator may appear in a poem, as it does in "Air Raid Over Harlem," the

poet-speaker is a liminal figure, who is both inside and outside the community, and whose

only authority is that arrogated by the community. This relatively unified poetic voice,

or collection of voices, bespeaks the existence of a new kind of audience, one which

Hughes had a major part in creating, particularly through his work in the cultural

institutions of the Communist Left. Ironically, despite Hughes’s activity within the

cultural (as well as more strictly "political") organizations and institutions

affiliated with the CPUSA, his poetry frequently received mixed or poor reviews from

left-wing American critics.

The range of addresses and addressees in Hughes’s poetry reached its zenith in the

early 1930s. During this period Hughes largely abandoned the types of poems that had made

his 1927 Fine Clothes to the Jew so notorious in the black press: poems formally

rooted in the secular and sacred musical forms of the blues and gospel music, as well as

in black rhetoric and representing as speaking subjects such "low-life"

characters as prostitutes, gamblers, murderers, drunks, and suicides. Instead Hughes’s

published poems fell into three general categories aimed at three relatively discrete

audiences: "uplift" and comic poems aimed largely at an African-American

audience that was outside the cultural orbit of the CPUSA, and outside the groups of black

intellectuals associated with relatively elite institutions and journals such as The

Crisis and Opportunity in such urban centers as New York, Boston, Philadelphia,

and Washington; "literary" poems (as exemplified by those in the privately

printed collection Dear Lovely Death, which if not "high" modernist were

aimed at an audience that was consciously "

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать