Jazz and Blues Styles From the Poetry of Langston Hughes

In the 1920’s and the 1930’s, African Americans in urban communities of New York, Harlem specifically, wanted to use music to express their feelings. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Harlem was heavily populated by a black, middle class, growing community. The Great Depression of 1929, when the stock market crashed, hit many African Americans hard. A large number of important black writers moved out of New York, thus ending the Harlem Renaissance.  With this in mind, music was used frequently to express the feelings many African Americans going through though times. Poetry way a medium used to share these feelings to the world.  In “Dream Deferred” and “The Weary Blues”, Langston Hughes uses musical techniques to relate jazz and blues styles from the Harlem Renaissance to his poetry.

First of all, “Dream Deferred”, a short poem by Langston Hughes, has examples of imagery to help the reader feel of the Harlem Renaissance. Inside this poem an example shown through imagery of a raisin drying up on a sunny day shows the escaping of a dream. “Does it dry up / Like a raisin in the sun?” (“Dream Deferred” lines 2-3) If the dream goes away, the question is asked about the absence of the dream to paint the picture of a grape shriveling up. On the other hand, some African Americans were turning to drugs, sex, and even music as they were searching for meaning.

Psychologically, the ‘dream deferred’ can be read as the black community’s desire for the realignment of the perceptual registers into harmonious balance, a desire that finds a necessarily incomplete fulfillment through a chain of metonymic substitutions, primarily from Imaginary fusions with music, but also from fusions associated with drugs and sex. (Eggers Par 33)

 The tangible items that blacks were turning to were things that would not satisfy them. This relates to the time period when they could not find a meaning in life and how the power struggle for rights was present in this time. Not only is imagery used, but also symbolism is used to get the feeling across.

In addition, “Dream Deferred” contains symbols to create the mood inside the Era. Langston Hughes describes the problem with forgetting a dream. Saying, “Or does it explode?” (“Dream Deferred” line 11) You can imagine an explosion, of a lost dream disappearing. With the need to remember a dream; the symbol of something exploding is negative, not like a firework making a beautiful array in a night’s sky. Similarly, that quote is used to create the connection between symbols, imagery, and harmony.