Comparing The Harlem Renaissance And Langston Hughes

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The Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes have a special connection with each other because of the significance of the time period. For one, the Harlem Renaissance occurred from 1920-1935 which corresponded with the age of Jazz and the start of recorded music along with the radio becoming popular. Hughes’ poetry and writing captures the essence of the age and his autobiography The Big Sea offers a story of an individual striving to overcome racial barriers to success (Enotes). The 1920’s became the rise of pop music, also known as jazz, which became popular through the help of the radio. Since Hughes was born in 1902 with his early life beginning in New York, he was well aware of the musical style of the time therefore, making it easier for …show more content…

It contains poetry and essays, which Hughes contributes to, that offers an outline of the significance of black culture. Hughes questions black art more specifically than Locke who was more conservative. Locke imagines that blacks would adapt whereas Hughes wants separate identity for African Americans. In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, Hughes explains that true black art was racial art that gives away with the “mountain,” a metaphor that symbolizes the obstacles and dangers of adaptation into a white world. However, many of Hughes’s own poems were related to race and the way they were …show more content…

Paul Laurence Dunbar, however, serves as a negative example for Hughes. Dunbar uses dialect in his verse that sound overtone whereas Hughes uses dialect in his blues poems but in an entirely different way. Even though Dunbar was one of the most renowned African American writers, praised by both black and whites, some critics criticized him as sentimental and stereotypical. Two other influential black writers during the Harlem Renaissance were W. E. B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson. Along with Locke, these two also reputed the Negro spiritual as the “folk gift” of black music. Therefore, they rejected blues and jazz because they thought they were not serious forms of music. James Weldon Johnson was known to be a father figure to many young writers including Hughes (English). Since Hughes admired him, Johnson’s style of writing have impressed him as well. Johnson even read Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” aloud at a banquet in 1925 held by Opportunity magazine

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