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Montage of a Dream Deferred
Lying in the gutter in front of a Lenox Avenue ginmill, Harlem of the fishtail Dacillac and Sugar Hill duplex set, Harlem of the cold-water walk-up, Harlem of the Policy and Numbers Kings and the Holy Shouters, Harlem of the night funerals and the charity ladies, and Harlem of the leaky roofs and women in dark doorways, Harlem of race riots and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and be-bop bands at Minton's Playhouse and the Savoy.
Here is popular poetry in the best since of the word brought to us by Langston Hughes-America's most famous black poet.
Here is popular poetry in the best since of the word brought to us by Langston Hughes-America's most famous black poet.
75 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
7 people are currently reading
722 people want to read
About the author
Langston Hughes
616 books2,149 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 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 10, 2020
Atmospheric and colloquial, Hughes brings his readers onto the streets and into the bars and clubs of Harlem. His language itself is part of these scenes and he definitely captured the time and spirit of place, culture, and people. It's an enjoyable and heartfelt read, celebratory, but also depicts the realities of racism in America.
July 25, 2025
I love poetry meant to be sung, and while Hughes’ work isn’t precisely that, he tends to consciously model it on popular musical forms in a unique, beautiful way. This set is dense in musical references and gives an extremely vivid portrait of Harlem circa 1950.
February 22, 2021
this is such beautiful poetry. bonus that it's not hard to interpret and that it's fun.
September 14, 2018
One of the poems that redefined the way I thought about modernism: not as an elite reflection on "the vast futility" or contemporary life, as T.S. Eliot called it, but as a resource for creating conversations between seemingly disparate aesthetics. (Eliot actually did quite a bit of that in The Waste Land, but his theory was almost unremittingly elitist.) Hughes combines blues, various sorts of jazz, intricate ironies, polyvocal choral reflections of African American life framed, as he phrases it near the end of Montage, as a "dream within a dream."
January 31, 2024
Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) begins with a brief prefatory note:
The work that follows, which Hughes suggests is meant to be read as a single piece rather than ninety-one discrete poems, attempts to catalog twenty-four hours within postwar Harlem. Hughes’ work is acutely documentarian in nature (one could argue William Carlos William’s Patterson and Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead operate here as direct predecessors) and attempt to capture the cultural tension within Harlem through the musical vernacular of “jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop.” As Hughes notes above, the sonic affordances of jazz poetry become the most appropriate language through which to describe a “community in transition,” as a dissonant “transition” between harmonic keys articulates a break from the Harlem Renaissance spanning the 1920s and 1930s.
Hughes’ Montage is, to an extent, an elegiac poem. In “The Nonsense of Bebop,” John Lowry situates Montage within the aftermath of cultural optimism within Harlem that preceded the poem. “Although still a major destination for poor migrant blacks during the Great Depression, Harlem had become better known nationally as an explosive site of urban racial conflict, first in 1935 and then in 1943,” Lowry writes. “The 1943 riot—one of many in black urban communities across the United States that year—took place after a white policeman had shot a black soldier.” The “deferred” dream of the title suggests the systemic postponement of basic rights that seemed on the near horizon during the latter half of the Harlem Renaissance.
It is also necessary to contend with the role of the “montage” within the poem’s title. The central metaphor for the poem is resolutely filmic: in the same manner that a montage cuts together a sequence of film to create a continuous whole, Hughes cuts together various “voices” of Harlem in an attempt of assembling a legible picture of a larger community. The documentarian impulse behind Hughes’ work is perhaps best understood in poems such as “Neon Signs,” in which Hughes simply reprints the names of various Harlem storefronts into a discrete poem, with the following postscript: “Mirror-go-round / where a broken glass / in the early bright / smears re-bop / sound.” (“Mirror-go-round,” a riff on “merry-go-round,” alludes to the deployment of nursery rhymes of limericks in other poems: “One, two, buckle my shoe!” in “Children’s Rhymes” and an allusion to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in “Evening Song.”)
Perhaps the most heavily anthologized poem in the collection is “Theme for English B,” in which a white English instructor asks the narrator (who shares many of the same biographical details as Hughes) to complete a paper about himself. “And let the page come out of you—,” the prompt demands. “Then, it will be true.”
The poem contends with some of the primary questions around voice that arise upon reading Montage in full. “So will my page be colored that I write?” the speaker question. “Being me, it will not be white.” The poem argues the potential failures of personal autobiography in a manner that demands consideration of Hughes’ project as a whole: we are transported into the perspective of a variety of narrators throughout the poem, each with distinct voices.
While poems such as “Theme for English B” are, perhaps, more heavily cited due to their palatability for a white audience, Hughes is most successful in his understanding of the radical potential of poetic language. “A cheap little tune / To cheap little rhymes,” he writes in “Sliver,” “Can cut a man’s / Throat sometimes.” Or, elsewhere, he puns heavily on the “feet” that is often a parade, elsewhere a protest march: the “foot” is also, quite notably, the poetic term for a rhythmic unit of poetry. Or, in “Necessity”: “Work? / I don’t Have to work. / I don’t have to do nothing / but eat, drink, stay black, and die.”
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In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of a jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.
The work that follows, which Hughes suggests is meant to be read as a single piece rather than ninety-one discrete poems, attempts to catalog twenty-four hours within postwar Harlem. Hughes’ work is acutely documentarian in nature (one could argue William Carlos William’s Patterson and Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead operate here as direct predecessors) and attempt to capture the cultural tension within Harlem through the musical vernacular of “jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop.” As Hughes notes above, the sonic affordances of jazz poetry become the most appropriate language through which to describe a “community in transition,” as a dissonant “transition” between harmonic keys articulates a break from the Harlem Renaissance spanning the 1920s and 1930s.
Hughes’ Montage is, to an extent, an elegiac poem. In “The Nonsense of Bebop,” John Lowry situates Montage within the aftermath of cultural optimism within Harlem that preceded the poem. “Although still a major destination for poor migrant blacks during the Great Depression, Harlem had become better known nationally as an explosive site of urban racial conflict, first in 1935 and then in 1943,” Lowry writes. “The 1943 riot—one of many in black urban communities across the United States that year—took place after a white policeman had shot a black soldier.” The “deferred” dream of the title suggests the systemic postponement of basic rights that seemed on the near horizon during the latter half of the Harlem Renaissance.
It is also necessary to contend with the role of the “montage” within the poem’s title. The central metaphor for the poem is resolutely filmic: in the same manner that a montage cuts together a sequence of film to create a continuous whole, Hughes cuts together various “voices” of Harlem in an attempt of assembling a legible picture of a larger community. The documentarian impulse behind Hughes’ work is perhaps best understood in poems such as “Neon Signs,” in which Hughes simply reprints the names of various Harlem storefronts into a discrete poem, with the following postscript: “Mirror-go-round / where a broken glass / in the early bright / smears re-bop / sound.” (“Mirror-go-round,” a riff on “merry-go-round,” alludes to the deployment of nursery rhymes of limericks in other poems: “One, two, buckle my shoe!” in “Children’s Rhymes” and an allusion to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in “Evening Song.”)
Perhaps the most heavily anthologized poem in the collection is “Theme for English B,” in which a white English instructor asks the narrator (who shares many of the same biographical details as Hughes) to complete a paper about himself. “And let the page come out of you—,” the prompt demands. “Then, it will be true.”
The poem contends with some of the primary questions around voice that arise upon reading Montage in full. “So will my page be colored that I write?” the speaker question. “Being me, it will not be white.” The poem argues the potential failures of personal autobiography in a manner that demands consideration of Hughes’ project as a whole: we are transported into the perspective of a variety of narrators throughout the poem, each with distinct voices.
While poems such as “Theme for English B” are, perhaps, more heavily cited due to their palatability for a white audience, Hughes is most successful in his understanding of the radical potential of poetic language. “A cheap little tune / To cheap little rhymes,” he writes in “Sliver,” “Can cut a man’s / Throat sometimes.” Or, elsewhere, he puns heavily on the “feet” that is often a parade, elsewhere a protest march: the “foot” is also, quite notably, the poetic term for a rhythmic unit of poetry. Or, in “Necessity”: “Work? / I don’t Have to work. / I don’t have to do nothing / but eat, drink, stay black, and die.”
Subscribe to my Substack here for weekly poetry reviews/recommendations!
February 26, 2021
One thing I really loved about this is how it read like a concept album. Hughes intended for this collection to be read as a flowing piece, with many poems leading onto and carrying on from one another. There are poems like 'High to Low' and 'Low to High' that are directly in conversation with one another, and poems like 'Green Memory' and 'World War II' that tell similar narratives from different perspectives. I also really love the food-related metaphors in 'Hope' and 'Harlem' which in the former piece seems very absurdist but takes on new connotations in the latter, with hope being this almost biological substance that can 'dry up / like a raisin in the sun'.
You also get this motif from the title of 'Good morning daddy! / Ain't you heard / the boogie woogie rumble / of a dream deferred?' which didn't really mean much to me at the start of the collection, but seemed to take on different meanings and contexts as it reappeared throughout. The collection is in some ways influenced by film, and I like to think that the use of a 'montage' shows us the multitude of lives taking place in Hughes's Harlem, with many characters popping up throughout, be that the frustrated student in 'Theme for English B', the schoolteacher, Joe, without any gossip to say about in 'Joe Louis', or the warring voices in the centrepiece 'Deferred'.
You also get this motif from the title of 'Good morning daddy! / Ain't you heard / the boogie woogie rumble / of a dream deferred?' which didn't really mean much to me at the start of the collection, but seemed to take on different meanings and contexts as it reappeared throughout. The collection is in some ways influenced by film, and I like to think that the use of a 'montage' shows us the multitude of lives taking place in Hughes's Harlem, with many characters popping up throughout, be that the frustrated student in 'Theme for English B', the schoolteacher, Joe, without any gossip to say about in 'Joe Louis', or the warring voices in the centrepiece 'Deferred'.
February 5, 2022
“You are white– / yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. / That’s American. / Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. / Nor do I often want to be a part of you. / But we are, that’s true! / As I learn from you, / I guess you learn from me– / although you’re older–and white– / and somewhat more free”.
favourites include:
"movies"
"tell me"
"not a movie"
"neon signs"
"dead in there"
"advice"
"relief"
"ballad of the landlord"
"gauge"
"cafe: 3a.m."
"125th street"
"theme for English B"
"low to high"
"high to low"
"World War II"
"causality"
"night funeral in Harlem"
"subway rush hour"
"brothers"
"likewise"
"Harlem"
"same in blues"
favourites include:
"movies"
"tell me"
"not a movie"
"neon signs"
"dead in there"
"advice"
"relief"
"ballad of the landlord"
"gauge"
"cafe: 3a.m."
"125th street"
"theme for English B"
"low to high"
"high to low"
"World War II"
"causality"
"night funeral in Harlem"
"subway rush hour"
"brothers"
"likewise"
"Harlem"
"same in blues"
March 17, 2017
All of Langston Hughes's poems are musical to a certain extent, but this collection is a songbook. It's filled with sounds and scenes that collectively tell a vibrant story of Harlem history through its residents, the music they love, and the problems they face. Hughes has much better poems elsewhere—only a handful of these truly stand tall on their own—but taken all together they are fun, funny, powerful, musical, sad, uplifting, and everything else that life is.
February 13, 2022
Langston Hughes has such a way in this collection of packing a punch in the last two lines of a lot of his poems and of subverting the reader's expectations.
My only regret while reading: that I can't hear the street music I imagine the poem's speakers are speaking to so well as I would like.
My only regret while reading: that I can't hear the street music I imagine the poem's speakers are speaking to so well as I would like.
June 25, 2024
my favorite of the three books of poems i've read of his, probably owing to a hughes' experience and the changes in the world around him since his earlier works. has a few of his best-known poems, though one of my favorites is nowhere to be seen in any of these three. anyways, fun to read. the man had a way with words!
November 20, 2025
Immerse yourself in post-ww2 America
This collection of poems does a terrific job of transporting us to the past
See how some things last
It's kinda scary, huh?
The dream deferred
By old white men
Keep ringing that bell!
again and again
This collection of poems does a terrific job of transporting us to the past
See how some things last
It's kinda scary, huh?
The dream deferred
By old white men
Keep ringing that bell!
again and again
November 28, 2025
This really stuck w me:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Read
March 29, 2024read this in middle school and reread it again tonight 🥹
April 17, 2024
read for ENGL 3894W: Langston Hughes w/ Vera Kutzinski
November 11, 2024
Apparently Hughes viewed this volume as one large poem, according to the editors of his Collected Poems. Contains some of his most well-known works, but it's overall closer to a 3.5 than a 4.
October 18, 2025
My dream has been deferred by this book.
October 30, 2025
I found myself at Langston Hughes house in Harlem last year. While there , I decided to read a copy of Hughes’ “I’ve Known Rivers” that I carry in my purse.
What does happen to a dream deferred, does it die like a “raisin in the sun?”
What does happen to a dream deferred, does it die like a “raisin in the sun?”
December 11, 2020
“Montage of a Dream Deferred” is Harlem in the 1950s and 60s through Langston Hughes’ eyes. He shows us the music, the beauty, the struggles, the systemic racism.
Ballad of the Landlord
Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?
Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It's a wonder you don't fall down.
Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that's Ten Bucks more'n I'l pay you
Till you fix this house up new.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain't gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!
Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.
Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.
Advice
Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean —
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
Ballad of the Landlord
Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?
Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It's a wonder you don't fall down.
Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that's Ten Bucks more'n I'l pay you
Till you fix this house up new.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain't gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!
Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.
Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.
Advice
Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean —
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
November 18, 2022
Langston Hughes is one of my favorite poets and I found this to be very interesting to look through with many of his greatest poems within. My favorite being, "Harlem."
Read
February 8, 2017Read for school
September 22, 2015
moderate
March 8, 2016
I've never read this entire piece, and so glad I did. I have a new favorite love poem-"Juke Box Love Song." Do yourself a favor and read it! Short, sweet and beautiful in its genius!
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews