Langston Hughes Research Paper

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Pages: 3

expression (Gates (Jr.) and Jarrett 69). Langston Hughes followed his own advice, using his personal experience for the subject matter of much of his poetry. For his work, he intended to overcome the inferiority complex that ravaged the values and attitudes of the black middle class.
The general principle which the Negro material illustrates is that the racial temperament selects out of the masses of cultural materials, to which it had access, such technical, mechanical and intellectual devices as to meet its needs at a particular period of its existence (Patterson 652). It clothes and enriches with such new customs, habits, and cultural forms as it is able, or permitted to use. Hughes put into these relatively external things such concrete meanings, as its changing experience and its unchanging racial individual demanded. He chiefly valued poetry based on the experiences of the common man: “The best poetry is not written in books, but comes from the lives of men and women in the streets…you have to learn to be yourself…natural and undeceived as to who you are, calmly and surely you” (658). It can be corroborated that a great poet always pursues his own cultural materials to foster much precious work of art. Likewise, the culture and tradition to which a poet belong, provides all the
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Hughes retorted to the charge that his poems were indelicate with “so is life” (55). To the charge that he dealt with “low life” (55), he asked whether “life among the better classes [was] any cleaner or any more worthy of a poet's consideration?” (56). What disturbed many critics was not merely the class of people Hughes wrote about but also the approach he took towards that class, and the identity established between himself and that