Langston Hughes, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1936. Wikimedia Commons.
Poet · Pairing V
Langston Hughes
1901–1967 · Poet of the Harlem Renaissance
“I, too, sing America.”
Langston Hughes was one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance — the extraordinary flowering of African American art, music, and literature in 1920s Harlem. A poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist, he made it his life’s work to put the everyday experience, speech, and music of Black Americans at the center of serious poetry.
His great innovation was to bring the rhythms of jazz and the blues directly into verse. “The Weary Blues” (1925), which won him early acclaim, recreates a night of blues piano in Harlem, letting the music’s sway, repetition, and sorrow shape the poem itself. In doing so, Hughes helped expand what American poetry could sound like.
Across a long career he remained a powerful, generous voice for dignity and justice, and he is now recognized as one of the most beloved poets in American literature.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing V — The Cityscape & the New Rhythm →