Langston Hughes' Poetry

Langston Hughes' Poetry

What was the dream that brought our ancestors to America? It was rebirth, the craving for

men to be born again, the yearning for a second chance. With all of these ideas comes the

true American dream—Freedom. This is the condition in which a man feels like a human

being. It is the purpose and consequence of rebirth. Throughout the life of Langston

Hughes he presented ideas in his writings that help to define his perception of the

American dream.In beginning, Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin,

Missouri. His father was James Nathaniel Hughes, a man who studied law but was unable

to take the examination for the bar because he was black. His mother was Carrie Hughes,

a woman who studied at the University of Kansas in an ongoing struggle to earn a living

outside of domestic labor. Langston's father left home to live in Cuba and then Mexico to

free himself from the Jim Crow laws and Segregation. Hughes then went to live with his

grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas until he was thirteen. His grandmother, Mary Sampson

Patterson Leary Langston, was very prominent in the African American community of

Lawrence. Her first husband was killed at Harper's Ferry while fighting with John

Brown; her second husband, Hughes' grandfather, was a prominent politician in Kansas

during the Reconstruction. During the time that he lived with his grandmother, however,

she was old and poor resulting in little to eat and forcing them to rent out part of their

small house. Unable to give Langston the attention he needed and his feelings of hurt and

rejection by both his mother and father caused him to grow up very insecure and unsure

of himself. In the second grade Langston was introduced to books and soon became

fascinated with them and found it as an escape from his world into the wonderful world

inside of them. At the age of thirteen Hughes went to live with his mother in Lincoln,

Illinois and then Cleveland, Ohio where he went to high school. It was in Lincoln that

Hughes wrote his first poem after being elected class poet by his fellow classmates.

Hughes, the only black at his school, said that the only reason that he was elected was that

his peers felt that he must have a good sense of rhythm because of the color of his skin.

This position of class poet sparked Hughes' love for poetry and was the start of his life as

a poet. Hughes soon began to write poetry quite frequently and he kept it all in a journal