But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people? Helping students to answer this question is the primary purpose of this lesson. Five journal entries and accompanying class discussions guide students in developing a general definition of voice in poetry, and in analyzing and appreciating the poetic voice of Langston Hughes in particular.
These writing and discussion activities culminate in a writing assignment Activity 7, below , in which students either write a poem expressing their own voice as developed in their journals , or write about one of the qualities of Langston Hughes's poetic voice as explored in class discussion. Each journal exercise is accompanied by the reading and discussion of one poem by Langston Hughes. Although Activities 2 through 6 are designed to be presented as a sequence, beginning with a definition exercise Activity 1 and culminating in a final writing assignment Activity 7 , each of them can also be adapted as a stand-alone lesson for a single class period.
As you and your students work through the activities of this lesson, create a list, just below the working definition of voice that you wrote on the board earlier, consisting of additional items and qualities that contribute to a distinctive poetic voice. Use the Guiding Question to help your students make choices about which qualities might belong in a more comprehensive definition of poetic voice.
For now it is enough just to list the possibilities; as a culminating activity, students will develop a revised definition of poetic voice that incorporates the discoveries your class made while reading the poetry of Langston Hughes Activity 7.
While you will not want to begin with the definition above, you may find that, having worked through the activities below, your students will be able to come up with an essentially equivalent formulation, for by this stage they will have learned to identify a wide variety of qualities in Hughes's poetry that have made his voice a forceful, distinctive, and memorable one for so many readers. What do you see? What do you tend to notice in others and in the world around you?
What do you tend to remember? When you think of the past, what images stay with you? Ask students to take notes on any interesting images they notice as the poems are read.
Then read all of the poems aloud. Before discussing them, give your students some silent time to read through the poems again on their own, making notes on any interesting images they find in each poem.
As a class, discuss the imagery and the emotions expressed in each poem. You might wish to take each of the poems in turn, for each has something new to reveal about how vivid images may be yoked with strong emotions to create memorable poetry.
With the first poem, for example, you could begin by having students identify the poem's two most prominent images: the broken-winged bird and the barren field. Then have students brainstorm all the feelings they associate with these images for now, just "free associate" and do not censor any possibilities.
Discuss how these feelings are linked with the concept and word to which the two images are metaphorically linked: "life. The result is a general idea we can all grasp enlivened by vivid images whose associations we can all share. You can apply the same approach to your discussion of "Dream Deferred," which links images that elicit feelings of strong physical revulsion the festering, running sore, for instance to an otherwise hazy and ephemeral idea a "dream".
Notice that this poem does not tell you what a "dream deferred" is or what it must become; Hughes merely poses the question, leaves the answer open, although he does so with the unforgettable force that has made his poetic voice so distinctive and memorable. All of us notice different sorts of things in the world around us. Some people are quick to notice the clothes others wear and to remember the details for days; other people do not notice and would not remember such details to save their lives.
What we see and hear and touch and smell around us--the sensual "pictures" that remain in our memories--are for poets and writers the raw stuff of memorable images and metaphors. This journal assignment has two parts. First, students should write about a memorable event that happened more than one year ago.
In their journal entries, they should emphasize two things: 1 as many physical details they can remember--clothes people wore, the weather, sounds, etc. Next, ask students to take an analytical step back from their writing and try to come up with one or two metaphors that might make this event memorable to readers.
The metaphors should match one or more details with one or more of the feelings they experienced at the time. Ask students to share one of their metaphors with the rest of class and, if it's necessary for understanding the metaphor, ask them to briefly summarize their memorable event. This discussion of emotion and metaphor will be picked up in subsequent discussions in the activities below. Who are you? How do others see you?
How do you see yourself? How would you like others to see you? There are several possibilities for a culminating writing assignment related to Langston Hughes:. Skip to main content. Lesson Plan. Photo caption. Portrait of Langston Hughes. Library of Congress. What qualities make a writer's voice forceful, distinctive, and memorable? Learn about the qualities that make Langston Hughes's voice distinctive, forceful, and memorable.
Learn how poetry gives shape, direction, and meaning to strong emotions. Lesson Plan Details Preparation. Before teaching this lesson, read through the poems and accompanying exercises below.
The five journal entries give students practice in expressing their own voice by asking them to respond to five questions: What do you see? Where do you come from? What obstacles have you overcome in life? What do you feel strongly about? Activity 1. Defining Voice On the board, write a working definition of voice that is appropriate for your students' level of preparation and that reflects what they already know.
The simplest definition is that a writer's voice reveals his or her personality. A strong contrast might help to make the point: read a passage from an encyclopedia or perhaps your tax form and read a passage from one of the poems by Langston Hughes Activity 2. Here is a little more background on the subject of voice.
Unlike, say, iambic pentameter, which has a fairly constrained meaning, voice has been extended metaphorically far beyond its original sense of the vocal qualities of a particular speaker. According to one dictionary of critical terms, to speak of voice in a poem is to " Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Activity 2. Variations on a Dream What do you see? For journal entry 1, students will respond to the question: What do you see?
Return briefly to your working definition of voice in poetry. Review the Guiding Question. In your class discussions of imagery, metaphor, and emotion, or in your students' journal exercises, has anyone discovered any qualities that help to make a poet's voice forceful, distinctive, and memorable?
Make a list on the board below your original working definition. Before moving on to additional poems, you may wish to share with your students Winhold Reiss's portrait of Langston Hughes as a young man; you can find this portrait by doing a search on the EDSITEment-reviewed National Portrait Gallery website.
What qualities in the young Hughes has this painter tried to capture? Do these qualities fit with those reflected in the voice that you heard in the three "Dream" poems? Activity 3. Before reading and discussing the poem, ask your students to warm up their minds with journal entry 2.
The question is essentially the same one that Hughes describes in his poem, " Theme for English B ": say something about yourself; answer the deceptively simple question, who are you? Reassure students that you know this is an extremely open-ended question.
If you like, you can qualify this question a bit: How do others see you? But the open-endedness of the question is part of the point here, for the purpose of this exercise is to parallel the situation described at the beginning of Hughes's poem, "Theme for English B.
Give them time to read the poem to themselves before reading the poem aloud in class--they will easily recognize the parallel with the journal exercise they have just completed. After reading the poem aloud, ask students to identify which section of the poem is part of the "page" that Hughes writes for his instructor, and which section represents the thoughts in his mind just before he begins to write. What are the differences between that first stanza, representing the poet's thoughts to himself as he contemplates the assignment, and the subsequent stanzas, which express how he presents himself to an audience, in this case his instructor?
List some of things that Hughes includes in his self-presentation. The poem is straightforward and speaks for itself, but reveals a more subtle and sly speaker the more you reread it and think about how Hughes has turned the instructor's question on its head. Who is "talking" here? How can Hughes say to his instructor that they are a part of each other?
Do we as readers have a part in this conversation? Your students should readily identify the central theme of this poem: the role that race plays in self-identity and in our relations with others. In Hughes's poem, the relationship of "you" and "me" is charged with race. The speaker in the poem is black, the instructor is white. But think about Hughes's relationship with that unseen audience: readers of his poem. The reader of Hughes's poem may, of course, be of any race, so the relationship between poet and reader--between "me" and "you"--is always shifting with each new reader.
Ask your students about their own relationship as readers to Hughes's poem. How does their own race matter in how they read this poem? He thus created an art form vested in the African-American experience:. Dreams have always figured prominently in the works of Langston Hughes. Tracy I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes […]. Within a mostly hostile Black middle-class context, Hughes was one of the first poets of the s along with Jean Toomer to show the beauty and grace of ordinary people — people who were paradigms of courage and bravery and who were not perceived as the embodiment of beauty.
Yet, the victory of the Second World War brought new promises and perspectives to a people who had already been forgotten after the First World War and who would be forgotten once again.
In Montage , Hughes wrote on the outcomes of years of segregation. Montage is, indeed, about the expected changes that did not come and the disillusions of Black people after the war. While the government of the United States ignored the rights promised to every citizen of the United States regardless of race or color, in Montage Hughes promoted the truth of the American Dream and the reality of Black Americans, including those who migrated to Harlem in New York.
Hints at these changes, which accelerated as a consequence of World War I, are made clear in the poem. With the Great Migration, Harlem saw dramatic demographic changes at the beginning of the s which transformed the area into a mostly Black and Latino part of the city. If greatness is measured by size, the Great Migration was great indeed. The evacuation of the black belt was particularly striking. Harlem was made a national symbol of the New Negro, and of the Jazz Age.
When the new century began the prevailing attitude toward the Negro in New York City had been one of hostility and increasing alienation. And as far as the majority of the population was concerned, there was no change in this dominant reaction of the city to the Negro people. The racial antagonism of the majority made necessary the creation of segregated communities like Harlem.
Osofsky As suggested in the poem, the different migratory fluxes transformed Harlem, but the racial antagonism mentioned by Osofsky did not prevent Black people from continuing to migrate to Northern cities, particularly to New York:.
Good morning, daddy! What happens to a dream deferred? Nevertheless, the end of the poem suggests disappointment at unachieved expectations. The permanence of the oral voice is enhanced through a series of questions and comparisons, so that the poem can be read like a dialogue between two persons who answer each other. The italics translate what the character has to have ; the roman letters translate what the character is to be. This poem shows how dreams can be very common and ordinary and how the persona is impatient to get its part of the dream.
By offering a voice to simple persons whose dreams are far from extraordinary, Hughes revealed his interest in common Black people. A poet is a human being; each human being must live within his time, with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country. Music is omnipresent in Montage. Blues is a recurrent form, and boogie-woogie is also exploited in several poems which are close to the same musical structure with syncopations, variations, and repetitions.
To Hughes, the use of Black music was a fundamental way of establishing the continuity between African-American creativity and his own creativity which he inscribed in the African-American experience, the basis of racial pride. By intertwining the rhythm of Black music blues, jazz or be-bop to his writing, Hughes not only required readers to reconsider all assumptions on the literary use of folklore, he also created his own oral aesthetics to produce a new form of folk poetry.
Hughes merged the African American oral and written traditions, exploiting conventions, techniques, and the goals of both to achieve a poetry that is intellectually stimulating, socio-politically responsible, and aesthetically pleasing, both as folk poetry and literature. Tracy 2. Becoming is the pure movement evident in changes between particular events.
This is not to say that becoming represents a phase between two states, or a range of terms or states through which something might pass on its journey to another state. Rather than a product, final or interim, becoming is the very dynamism of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal or end-state.
The reader is also asked to assert his own understanding and interpretation. These multiple entries typify minor literature as defined by Deleuze:. Frever notes:. In turn, this synthesized oral print text requires a reader to reconsider all assumptions brought to reading as an individual act, and a print form. Frever 2. They also offer a space of expression and of listening to common Black people:. Take it away!
Hey, pop! The main preoccupation of the persona is to be heard. Questions and exclamations appear alternately to demand full participation from the listening partner and, implicitly, from the reader. The reader must be an active one, fully engaged in the reading and interpretation of the poem, thus leading to the double-voice technique which Henry Louis Gates Jr. He uncovered a system of interpretation that slaves of African ancestry brought with them to the New World.
He thus grasped the meaning of the double-voice inherent to all African-American texts. I had a dream And I could see A million faces Black as me! A nightmare dream: Quicker than light All them faces Turned dead white! Boogie-woogie, Rolling bass, Whirling treble Of cat-gut lace. What Hughes is doing here differs from his earlier work, as his poetry works consciously to bolster Black personhood through obscure allusion. His writing followed, in fact, the evolution of his society and was in keeping with his time and denunciations.
The simplicity of his style also shows his wish to make his ideas accessible to all. With his famous speech, King gave new validity to the dreams of the oppressed which the poet had already envisioned a decade earlier.
See that Lady Dressed so fine? Hughes wants us to understand boogie-woogie not only as a musical style, but also a way of living which the lady does not share. This was also the way for the poet to express his rebellion against the African-American middle-class, showing how he wrote for marginalized people. These different forms of music connect Black people and allowed Hughes to foreground Black culture and identity.
He successfully recaptured the American energy and inspiration during and after the war through these poems. He described the life of a community in transition. The victory of the Second World War was, indeed, full of promises for Americans, but for African Americans, the chasm between American social ideals and reality began to emphasize the need for action and changes.
African Americans were always the losers of the American Dream. They needed to reinvent themselves to reclaim their part of the Dream. Different personas tell their own stories and propose a post-war inventory of the Black community living in Harlem.
The poems also put the American Dream in perspective and offer a reflection on what prevented it from coming true for Black Americans. Beyond that, Hughes also wondered what future was to be expected and whether reclaiming the American Dream was actually a necessity for African Americans. The dream came true for those who crossed the color line, but they suffer as they miss their community and have lost all cultural values.
Conversely, those who remain in Harlem, the symbol of the spatial margin, do not have their share of the dream but preserve their soul and cultural references. Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? The interrogative voice is omnipresent and forces the reader to be active since he is asked different questions.
Hughes translates, through an aggressive mode, the tensions between the reality of the Black experience and the unrealized dream. Tensions disappear as the collection of poems ends. In this work, Hughes went further in his creative process and denunciation of the American Dream which was still unattainable for Black people.
In an ironic and sarcastic tone, Hughes provoked and demanded answers to concrete social issues. Loyal to Black music, Hughes followed its history and evolution and appropriated free-jazz to express his bitterness and his vision of the times he lived in see Sylvanise Free-jazz was another way to develop the relationship between his writing and music, as well as mirror the evolution of relations between African Americans and White Americans, and to highlight international relations between Africans and African Americans.
In , near the dusk of his career, and the dawn of the civil rights movement, Langston Hughes began an epic poem in a hotel room in Newport, R. A riot broke out at the festival that year when many fans — mostly young and white — were barred from entering the sold-out show and became violent. Karpman In the s, free-jazz musicians such as John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman questioned traditional musical writing and explored new songs and a new tempo.
Free-jazz marked a split with binary and ternary rhythms, and evolved with the Black Power movement. To use this style was also a way to carry on questioning traditional writing and to break with literary habits.
Hughes applied the free-jazz technique to his writing to lose the reader in a poetic maze. Like a free-jazz musician, he experimented new forms, a new style and pushed his reader to decode the layers of meanings and to appropriate his writing to find his way in this maze made of words and sounds.
Hughes, who had become more radical, wrote on the struggles Black people had to carry on to reach the American Dream. His call was a poetic and revolutionary one, somehow outside mainstream culture, to maintain an alternative to the poetry of the counter-culture and the Beat generation.
The poet thus became more radical and invoked his community to mobilize itself and fight against American imperialism. Ask Your Mama was never meant to be simply read silently to oneself. Alongside the words of the poem, Hughes sketched out detailed instructions for musical accompaniment.
He planned to stage an elaborate performance of his piece with the help of jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus, but died before seeing it to fruition. Of course, with Ask your Mama and its complex style, Hughes no longer addressed common Black people, but his writing remained at their service and was meant to bring them hope, as well as pride and dignity denied them for so long.
Repetition, stuttering, gaps and silences are parts of such strategies. His language, which was judged subversive during the modern period, runs through the main discourse to disclose another truth simple words cannot tell. Montage was the portrait of a changing neighborhood which believed in dreams that created disillusions.
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