Blues and Hughes
.... If you close your eyes and listen you ,too, will hear the erythematic, pulse and beat of the works of Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance, an African- American cultural movement in New York City, was flourishing when one of Langston Hughes’ first published poems was released in 1926 and the influences of this era are quite visible. In, “The Weary Blues”, Hughes uses rhythm and tempo to portray one of the focal entertainers of decade, the jazz musician. The prose uses rhyme to convey the verses of the musician's song and sounds, such as, the “thump, thump, thump”, in line 23, to illustrate his dance and movements. When all this is incorporated together it gives Langston’s poem a beat equivalent to the art form of the Negro he depicts, the blues song. Dream Boogie possesses perhaps the most prevalent Harlem jazz attribute of all of Hughes’ poetry, even the title of the poem describes the sentiment of the age. “Hey Pop!, Re-bop, Mop!” and other lines gives the poem a beat and when read out loud, help it flow, just as would the verses of jazz. This “lyrical song” even describes the feeling of many of the singers of the time period, who resonate of oppressed Negroes who dared to aspire even if many of these aspirations were “dreams deferred”. Hughes was middle aged when he composed the Trumpet Player, in which he utilizes his written words to express the actual significance of jazz to its performer, “The music / From the trumpet at his lips / Is honey /Mixed with liquid fire / The rhythm from the trumpet at his lips / Is ecstasy / Distilled with old desire”. Langston recognizes that his readers cannot e...