"Harlem- Dream Deferred"

One poem that is the most recognized as depicting life in Harlem, New York is “Harlem,” also known as “Dream Deferred.” When many people first read the poem without background information, they think that it is only about a forgotten or postponed dream; however, “Harlem” means much more, and Hughes’s intentions on writing the poem are not only to describe a broken dream, but to depict life for African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance and their struggles with racism and discrimination.
Hughes was determined to weave his literary works from real life personal human experiences, so the element of history is included in the poems that deal with the Harlem Renaissance, including “Dream Deferred” (Ekanath 2). Realism in literature is an "attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent figures and objects exactly as they act or appear in life," and Hughes sought to include the African American condition in his work (Ekanath 3). Although African Americans were emancipated from slavery in 1863, they were still struggling for equality from struggle and misery years after. Because of this, many works by African American writers like Langston Hughes started to appear (Ekanath 3).

A strategy Langston Hughes uses is concealing “politics” in “poetry” (Walkowitz 1). Hughes wanted his writing to be recognized as “art” that also depicts social and racial discrimination. Along with the historical viewpoint in “Harlem,” the poem is “marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages … punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and distortions of the music of a community in transition” (Smith 4). In a superficial reading of Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," one sees only its obvious simplicity, but a closer reading reveals unresolved conflict because of the outer body of the poem that contends with the elements of its inner body (Hansen 1).While reading the poem, it is best to read as Hughes wrote, with the art of propaganda in mind and think of the life that African Americans had during the Harlem Renaissance.

Works Cited

Ekanath, Nila. "The Reality in Langston Hughes' Poems." Language in India 10.4 (2010): 13. Communication & Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

Hall, Jo Claire. Langston Hughes Peace Bird Original Drawing. 2008. Photograph. QOOP.com. 2010. Web. 12 Dec. 2010.

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. "Shakespeare in Harlem: The Norton Anthology, 'Propaganda,' Langston Hughes." Modern Language Quarterly 60.4 (1999): 495. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Life of Langston Hughes

Through the love of his people, Langston Hughes formed a special bond with African American readers in the United States as he demonstrated the struggles, sorrows, victories, and joys of black people. James Langston Hughes was born on February 1st, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, but because of his parent’s separation, he grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas with his grandmother (Langston Hughes). Hughes grew up in poverty, and the frequent absences of his mother and aging grandmother made him “unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome;” however, he discovered that books “began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books— where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language (Smith 367).Hughes’s first works appeared in the monthly high school magazine where he published short stories about racism (Smith 368). After graduating high school, Hughes had composed memorable poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” and “When Sue Wears Red,” which expressed Hughes’s first major literary response to the segregation he encountered during childhood (Smith 368). Not long after, Hughes led a varied life of writing and working at various humbling jobs, including, a messman on ships anchored in the Hudson River, which allowed him to visit west coast of Africa (Smith 368).

Langston Hughes’s early poems captured some of the sights and sounds of the rhythms of blues and jazz, in which he had “taken an indigenous African American art form, perhaps the most vivid and commanding of all, and preserved its authenticity even as he formally enshrined it in the midst of a poem in traditional European form” (Smith 369). The subject matters of the blues—“love and raw sexuality, deep sorrow and sudden violence, poverty and heartbreak” made Langston Hughes one of the most controversial black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes clearly came to decisions about changes for the future, and decided to spend a year in the Soviet Union, where he contrasted the “humane Soviet treatment of its ethnic minorities with the horrors of American segregation,” in which he wrote and published the most radical verses of his life (Smith 370).

His finest volume in many years, Montage of a Dream Deferred, was a collection of poems about Harlem that reflected the “pressures of northern urban life on black migrants from the South but also of the spectacular way in which the jazz musicians maturing around the end of responded to those pressures in the new “bebop” jazz” (Smith 372). Included in Montage of a Dream Deferred is one of the most widely known and cherished poems, “Harlem” (“dream deferred”), which included special insight into the African American condition in Harlem (Smith 375). In his last years, Langston Hughes became a spokesman for civil rights, and died in Harlem in 1967 (Langston Hughes). Langston Hughes was African America’s most influential writer and a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Works Cited

"Langston Hughes." Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6th Edition. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson Longman, 2010.Print. 694-709.

Langston Hughes. Photograph. African American Writers. Ed. Valerie Smith. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. 369. Print.

Smith, Valerie. "Introduction." Introduction. African American Writers. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. 367-377. Print.

Harlem: The birth of the blues and the New Negro Movement

A renaissance is a "revival period of intellectual or artistic achievement" (Hall 1). And that is just what the Harlem Renaissance was, a period of cultural rebirth. African Americans first migrated to the north in order to work in factories that opened up during World War I (Hall 1). Unfortunately, racism forced them to settle into segregated urban housing away from whites (Hall 1). Although these African Americans were faced with hardships and discrimination, they decided to turn hard times into a period of remarkable “artistic and intellectual activity” in New York City’s Harlem, leading to the Harlem Renaissance (Hall 1).

The Harlem Renaissance era occurred during the Roaring 20s, also referred to as the Jazz Age. The real inspiration for jazz came primarily from the music, the feelings, and the history of blacks in America, and later gained national and worldwide recognition (Lowney 4). Black musical styles were becoming more and more attractive to whites, as whites would incorporate their styles into their own works and compositions (Hall 3). Artists used art to translate what Harlem jazz sounded like into a more visual form (Lowney 5). Visual artists played a key role in creating bold portraits of African Americans during this period, as well as distinct shapes and vivid color in scenes of African life (Lowney 5). From the 1920s to the beginning of the Great Depression, black writers and artists from Harlem generated an extraordinary amount and diversity of culture.

Harlem is called the Negro Capital of music and art. But it is more—“it is the nerve center of advancing Black America. It is the fountainhead of mass movements” (Lowney 8). Many visionaries in the Harlem Renaissance believe that “New Negro Movement” is a more accurate term for the development of black life in the 1920’s than “Harlem Renaissance” because it depicts the African American belief that it was time for the emergence of a “new Negro,” one who was no longer willing to accept the racial status quo (Hall 4). An example of this is the poet Langston Hughes as he states, "we younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame" (Hall 6). The Harlem Renaissance was a period of change and a new beginning to show African American’s full potential.

Works Cited

Butler, Jerry. Harlem Renaissance. Photograph. Harlem Renaissance: Literature, Music, and Art. Webquest, 2001. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

Hall, Jane. "The Harlem Renaissance a Cultural Rebirth." Cobblestone 27.4 (2006): 3. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

Lowney, John. "Langston Hughes and the `Nonsense' of Bebop." American Literature 72.2 (2000): 357. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

Ringgold, Faith. The Flag Is Bleeding #2. 1997. Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City. Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Traditional Fine Art Online, Inc., 1996. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.

Beyond Harlem

Jazz, blues, poetry, dance, and musical theater. What do these things have in common? They came about during the Harlem Renaissance. Although one may not notice it without background information and research, much of the music, art, and poetry that influence today’s culture are all derived from the Harlem Renaissance.


After reading “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes, I was immediately drawn into the poem through Hughes’s use of vivid imagery, metaphors, and other literary devices. I could relate to the poem because I have had dreams postponed throughout my life. But as I read the background behind the poem, I noticed that although it relates to all people who have goals, there is a specific dream that Langston Hughes was referring to in “Dream Deferred”. The poem is also well known as “Harlem,” which signifies Hughes’s purpose for writing it during the Harlem Renaissance. Before reading the poem, I was not familiar with what the Harlem Renaissance was. By researching the connection and significance of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, I and others will be able to learn more about the importance of the era beyond the fact that it was the start of African American poets, writers, and musicians.