Langston Hughes’s Literary Revolution: Deliberate Choice of Jazz, Gospel and Black Poetry

Abstract

The present work intends to bring evidence to the point that Langston
Hughes is a revolutionary. As a matter of fact, like his contemporaries of
the Harlem Renaissance Movement and later on the writers and poets of
Negritude, he wrote poems that can be termed unconventional. They are so
called because they did not respect any prevailing aesthetic rules governing
poetry in their epoch. These poems are of three categories. Jazz poetry,
here Hughes patterned his poems after the rhythm of Jazz music. This
rhythm was very popular among the Blacks in Harlem. Gospel is another
new type of poetry created by Hughes. Here the poems are patterned after
Gospel music which is also popular with black churches in the South
especially during the slavery time. The last category of new poetry that
Hughes brought to the world of theater was Black poetry, that is, poetry
that was concerned with the black people’s experience in the U.S.A. Poems
from all these three categories are analyzed in the paper.