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Langston HughesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1925)
One of Hughes’s most famous poems, “The Weary Blues” is an example of Hughes’s jazz poems of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem is set in a bar in Harlem as the speaker observes a pianist playing blues music. The poem creatively utilizes literary devices like rhyme and meter that come together to embody blues as a form and a metaphor. The poem is considered one of the first works of blues performance in literature, and its vivid imagery and language highlight the struggle of life for a Black American man during the mid-1920s.
"If We Must Die" by Claude McKay (1919)
“If We Must Die” by African American poet Claude McKay is a response to racial violence against Black Americans during the Red Summer of 1919, a period after the First World War when white supremacist terrorism and riots took place across the United States, resulting in numerous deaths of African Americans. Although the poem does not mention any specific marginalized group, it is a traditional Shakespearean sonnet that encourages strength and hope against a deadly mob. The poem is considered by some to be the official start to the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement.
By Langston Hughes
Children’s Rhymes
Langston Hughes
Cora Unashamed
Langston Hughes
Dreams
Langston Hughes
Harlem
Langston Hughes
I look at the world
Langston Hughes
I, Too
Langston Hughes
Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes
Me and the Mule
Langston Hughes
Mulatto
Langston Hughes
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Not Without Laughter
Langston Hughes
Slave on the Block
Langston Hughes
Thank You, M'am
Langston Hughes
The Big Sea
Langston Hughes
Theme for English B
Langston Hughes
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Langston Hughes
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
Tired
Langston Hughes