Arnold Rampersad’s Shallow Look at Langston Hughes
...poet. Hughes was ill first when he was 17, saw his father for the first time in a long time, and had an awful experience. He became sick again at age 28 when a rich woman, whom he loved in the Biblical sense, cut him off (meaning financially). In both instances, Rampersad says, Hughes was lazy about his writing and okay with that, but his father and his patron rejected his choice, which infuriated the poet. “The notorious placidity of surface in Hughes, as I see it, bespeaks the extent to which he was a poet who preferred his poems unwritten” (1068), the critic observes. Hughes was not gay, as some people have said, but rather wanted to be a child again. Obviously he was not gay since he had relations with the older woman. The rejection of his father led to “abandonment and despair . . . closer to the origins of his poetry” (1069). After exploring these two forces – father and the “Godmother” – the essay turns to a third, Langston Hughes’s “psychological dependence” on his fellow African Americans. Rampersad analyzes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at length, saying the poem traces the transformation of pain (over his father) into triumph and an embrace of the people who accepted him. Hughes had to go through “the compressed ritual of passivity, challenge, turmoil, and transcendence” (1071) to write his great poetry. In this biographical criticism (relating the author’s work to his life), Rampersad makes some good points and has good support, but his claims can also be questioned. First of all, although Rampersad claims he’s challenging the picture of Langston Hughes as “shallow,” his description of the poet wanting to see himself “as an eternal child” (1068) seems the same as what other critics have said. Hughes was loving, open, lacking in will, and eager to please his elders. All of this could be interpreted as shallow. In other words, the critic agrees, just in...