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Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes

In 1940 Richard Wright, praising Langston Hughes’s contribution to the development of modern American literature, observed that Hughes’s “realistic position” had become the “dominant outlook of all those Negro writers who have something to say.”1 Nineteen years later James Baldwin faulted Hughes for failing to follow through consistently on the artistic premises laid out in his early verse. The problem with his unsuccessful poems, Baldwin said, was that they “take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of experience.” In succumbing to the idiomatic demands of a sociological perspective— the pressure, that is, to “hold the experience outside him”—they did not fulfill an essential criterion of Baldwin’s realism, namely, the evocation of a point of view that stands “within the experience and outside it at the same time.” To argue his point, Baldwin cited the last line of a jazz poem by Hughes called “Dream Boogie,” which first appeared as part of Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951. “Hughes,” said Baldwin, “knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics, what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. ‘Hey, pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!’ conveys much more on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be.”2