Langston Hughes

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but left after an
unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe,
a busboy, and a dishwasher, his poetry appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis
(NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League).1 As a poet, Hughes was the first person to
combine the traditional poetry with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.
As a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the
movements best known poet. He published two poetry collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).2 Mainly because of the depression Hughes became a socialist in
the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but he wrote many radical poems and essays in
magazines like New Masses and International Literature and spent a year in the Soviet Union.
In 1939 Hughes moved away from the political scene. During the war he supported the
Allies with patriotic songs and sketches and published a ...

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of performing music and poetry together” 4
“Besides having both a love of this music and the common black folk it was created by
and for, one of the reasons that Hughes began to draw on the blues tradition for writing his
poetry is that he hoped to capitalize on the blues craze.” 5Though the markets for music and
poetry were quite different, he thought he could somehow merge the two. “Hughes was a major
figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He borrowed extensively from blues and Jazz in his work, and
in doing so, set the foundations for a new tradition of black literacy influences by Black
music.”6
Langston Hughes employed the structures, rhythms, themes and words of the blues ...

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