Langston Hughes' "Harlem"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is one of the most recognizable and influential American poems of the twentieth century.

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes.Hughes’s position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. … His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’. … By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."

Hughes’s poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, February 5th, 2004. Today's poem is one that's been a long time coming on the Daily Poem. It's by Langston Hughes, and it's called Harlem.
0:20.2	We have featured quite a few of Langston Hughes's poems on the show over the years, but
0:27.3	never this one, perhaps his most famous and influential.
0:35.5	Hughes' birthday just passed on the first of the month, so no better time than the present to remember him and remember this poem. I'll read it twice. Taking a break in between to say if he thinks about it.
0:55.0	Here is Harlem.
1:00.0	What happens to a dream deferred?
1:04.0	Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
1:07.0	Or fester like a sore and then run.
1:14.3	Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?
1:19.4	Maybe it just sags like a heavy load
1:23.2	or does it explode?
1:51.1	Lanks and Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century. And this poem encapsulates a lot of the spirit, optimism, and angst of that movement and of the Black experience in America at the time. Hughes actually a pretty
2:07.3	controversial figure in his own day. His approach to poetry was to try and present the black experience in a realistic way, avoiding both shallow
2:28.0	caricature, but not attempting to whitewash or erase the complexities of life either.
2:38.8	This didn't always please other black intellectuals who thought he was exposing something unpleasant
2:51.0	nor did he always find
2:54.4	a warm reception
2:55.5	from his white
2:58.1	intellectual contemporaries
2:59.5	so this is
3:02.5	a poem that in some ways speaks
3:04.7	about his own experience as an artist
	...

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