The Harlem Renaissance: The Poetry Of Mckay And Langston Hughes

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The Harlem Renaissance brought about many emotions in both the African American and white communities. During this time, black Americans set a goal to produce a culture within the larger national culture. Two poets who aimed to end the false image that black Americans were inferior to whites were Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. Both of these poems reflect the courage these men had and the promise they saw for their community. McKay reflected his feelings of anger and vengeance in his poem “If We Must Die” while Hughes takes a much softer approach in his poem “I, Too.” However, during this time, whites were not as willing to listen to these poets, which caused more chaos and segregation. In the article Subverting the History of Slavery and Colonization in the Poetry of M. Al- Fayturi and Langston Hughes, Saddik Mohamed Gohar states “Due to the tragic developments on the social and political paradigms in the United States, Hughes argues that it is difficult to write about nature and love. Instead the committed black poet should write about revolution because ‘something has to change in America, and change soon’” (Gohar 16-17). We find this to be true in the poem “I, Too” by Langston Hughes as he writes about an African American man who works for a …show more content…
A lot of Hughes poems were based of Karl Marx’s theories, which are about class struggle and the conflict of ownership; Marx was also a strong believer in Communism, and in a Democratic society, people would refuse to read his works. The fact that Hughes and McKay wrote these poems shows how passionate they truly were about this subject. It is unusual for one to stand up to the majority, especially during this time, but the fact that these two men, along with many others, reached out to so many people speaks wonders about their creative

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