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Poetry
This ebook was produced for Standard Ebooks by Weijia Cheng, and is based on transcriptions from various sources and on digital scans from various sources.
ebook
Published January 11, 2024
About the author
Langston Hughes
592 books2,246 followersThrough poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include
Weary Blues
(1926) and
The Ways of White Folks
(1934).
People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...
People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
October 1, 2025
It’s probably not fair that I’m giving this collection only three stars. The problem is not in the poetry but in the fact that there is no context, annotation, or explanation to go along with this collection, beyond the fact that they were written between 1921 and 1928, and that they are in the public domain. Since I know little about Langston Hughes, I felt handicapped. I did look him up in Wikipedia, and that helped some.
A lot of the poetry in this collection are written from the seeming viewpoint of women, and felt pretty honest from the standpoint of wronged women. A number of poems were written the way Black people stereotypically talk. Others had repetitious lines that made me feel they could be set to music—not surprising, considering some of the poems are set in the jazz clubs of Harlem Langston would have been much more familiar with than, say, the rural south. (Fun fact—Hughes spent much of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas.)
I’d love to read more of Hughes, but hopefully with some notes to go along with them.
A lot of the poetry in this collection are written from the seeming viewpoint of women, and felt pretty honest from the standpoint of wronged women. A number of poems were written the way Black people stereotypically talk. Others had repetitious lines that made me feel they could be set to music—not surprising, considering some of the poems are set in the jazz clubs of Harlem Langston would have been much more familiar with than, say, the rural south. (Fun fact—Hughes spent much of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas.)
I’d love to read more of Hughes, but hopefully with some notes to go along with them.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review