The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes Arnold Rampersad, editor & David Roessel, associate editor Knopf 708 pp. $30.00 Review by Gerald Early Featured in BBR May 1995 "The proof of a poet," wrote Walt Whitman in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, probably one of the single greatest influences on Langston Hughes, "is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." There are few American poets for whom this statement is more true than Langston Hughes; perhaps Sandburg, Frost, probably Ginsberg, maybe Galway Kinnell. But the truth here as it applies to Hughes is hardly entire or complete, but rather ironic and ambivalent. Hughes wanted to absorb his country, and succeeded on a level far beyond that of any other black American poet. He surely is better known and more widely read than any other black poet. And he wanted his country to absorb him, which it did in about the only way it can absorb a black writer, by reminding itself that it is, after all, doing just that: absorbing a black writer with all the patronizing self-consciousness that that entails. However, these mutual acts of absorption, tinged as they were with suspicion and distress in a case so fraught with the grim, grievous weight of the bitter familiarity that only the American race dilemma can so uniquely produce, were accompanied by a complex of affections, bemusing to behold, that resulted in the making of Hughes' reputation. Scarcely any black poet has created as grand a persona of an American self as Hughes and few have produced an oeuvre that so consistently belies its simplicity and charm, its brilliance and ineptitude, with such cunning and terror. Hughes was not torn merely by the contradiction inherent in trying to meld being black and being American (a contradiction as old as, or even older than, DuBois' double consciousness statement in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. He solved this problem in a way that was to guarantee him a permanently beggared status as a major American poet made inconsequential because of the racial and accessible character of his work. What is of larger importance is that he managed, by using the large abstractions of American and blackness, of leftist politics and grand egalitarianism, to obscure his own torments and anxieties about his sexuality, about his parents, about his status as a public figure, about the function of poetry itself. Hughes, of course, stands as the major artistic link between Paul Laurence Dunbar, on the one hand, and that poet's special form of anxiety-of-influence from the white southern vernacularists and romantic folklorists at the end of the 19th century, and Amiri Baraka on the other, with his special form of anxiety-of-influence from the iconoclastic white Beats and white leftists of the cold war 1950s. Hughes, as a product of the '20s, was, to some considerable extent, able to renovate and reinvent black vernacular poetry (along with James Weldon Johnson whose 1927 God's Trombones was a seminal work), at times challenging the white control of black authenticity and black authentication. (In this regard of the black folk, what he and Zora Neale Hurston achieved, incontestably, was a remarkable attempt at liberation, not its fulfillment. Products such as the folk vernacular play, Mulebone, which they jointly wrote, and which caused their estrangement, reveal, equally incontestably, the difficulty of effecting this liberation, trapped as the play was, on the one side, by the comic "folkisms" of the popular radio show "Amos and Andy," which premiered in the 1920s, and, on the other side, by the grand pathos of Catfish Row in George and Ira Gershwin's and DuBose Heyward's folk opera "Porgy and Bess" which premiered in the mid-1930s. Middle-class whites still exercised enormous authority over the cultural idea of black folk.) Hughes, as a product of the '30s, was able to bring a leftist political dimension to his work (it was, incidentally, apparent in his 1920s work), that transformed how the folk were romanticized by black poets and transformed, in some vital ways, how the black poet saw himself in relation to the community for which he wrote. Like Dunbar and Baraka, Hughes was fascinated with black music, tried his hand at writing lyrics, and was taken with the possibilities of performing music and poetry together. In a sense all three of these poets are archaic, wishing in a sense to return poetry to something specifically oral and wishing to make something that could be called black poetry, as distinct from white poetry in both voice and technique. They are all, in their ways, highly experimental poets who seemed entrapped by the traditions they wished to escape. Hughes, in some ways, solved his problem about thematic concerns and political engagement by creating a pluralist America where blackness became a major defining strand of being American, an ideological and artistic stance not unlike Ralph Ellison's. (Ellison wrote: "And it is possible that any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole." One can clearly see this as one major aspect of Hughes' theory of constructing a black American poetry that would, in effect, operate as a kind of revision of the American writing that preceded and that is contemporaneous with it.) It's not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me-we two-you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too) Me-who? Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records-Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn't make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white- yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That's American. Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that's true! These are lines from Langston Hughes' popular poem, "Theme for English B," published in the spring of 1949, and it is as good an example of Hughes' mode of operation as any poem one might choose. Although Hughes wrote in his middle-forties, it has the characteristics of much of the work he produced as the young-Turk poet of the Harlem Renaissance: the rhythmic rhyming, the very accessible language, hip but unaffected, and, most important, the sense of America as a racial amalgam, a mulatto-ized or biracial America, a very mixed and mixed-up sense of pluralism. A world of mixed races and race-mixing fascinated Hughes, as is evidenced by the fact that his most famous play, and one of the most popular ever written by an African American, is called "Mulatto." Egalitarianism runs rampant in this poem: the instructor turns out to be as much a student as his student is an instructor, the young have as much to teach the old as the old the young, black partakes of white as much as white partakes of black. Hughes was our greatest poet of democracy, our greatest chanter of the poetics of pluralism since Walt Whitman. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Hughes' biographer, Arnold Rampersad, with David Roessel, poses the question: just how great a poet was Langston Hughes? What other question could such a volume hope to pose, its appearance attesting as it does to the fact that Hughes is now both a public monument and someone with a body of work that is worth thinking about. We encounter two issues in assessing Hughes the poet: first, Hughes wrote a great deal of significant work in other genres: autobiography, fiction, plays, children's books, newspaper pieces, histories and anthologies. Pressed to support himself solely through writing, Hughes wrote constantly. (Other writers have had this problem but not all of them have been as damaged by it as Hughes.) This work deflects our attention from the poetry and, in some sense, it may have deflected his attention from poetry as well. Hughes may have loved writing and reading poetry more than anything else and probably wrote in other genres simply for the money. The sheer volume of Hughes' work gives the impression that here was a somewhat harried man who, as James Baldwin once suggested, squandered his considerable gifts instead of employing them to his best benefit. I am struck by the fact that Hughes wrote a great deal of bad poetry, more than he should have if he had attended to his poetry as completely as he should have. Second, all of us encountered Hughes' work when we were children and thus tend to relegate it to our childhood. Hughes' poetry is used mostly to introduce children to poetry, not to sustain people's interest in it when they become adults. There is something about the beguiling nature of Hughes' simplicity that makes the poetry seem, to an adult reader, such a pose or self-evident series of postures, that it is impossible to say much about it. (I think Hughes is not popular with college teachers for precisely this reason. His poetry has what Dwight Macdonald called "the built-in reaction." What can be said about the poem has already been said by the poem.) There are two important observations to be made about Hughes the poet: first, he wound up exceeding his contemporary Countee Cullen (who has truly been relegated to the status of minor poet) not because he was a more gifted poet but because he had, in the end, a greater will to be a writer and a greater faith in what the act of poetry meant. Homosexuality, Communism, racial fads and fashions; Hughes was touched by all of this but never truly defined by any of it. Second, more than any other black writer of the 20th century, Hughes embodied and re-articulated his times through his poetry. The Renaissance, the Depression, WWII, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, Jazz, Blues, Spirituals, the vogue of black history itself, is all recorded in his poetry in a way that, considered collectively, virtually mythifies American and black American history. "I am the man... I suffered... I was there," Whitman wrote. Overworked, haunted by his sexual ambiguity, angered by racism, reviled by his father, burdened by his mother, harassed by anti-Communists and the right wing, Hughes never lost faith in the renewing possibilities of this teeming world. And it is for this reason, for the sheer sense of confirmation and affirmation that the work provides about a common American humanity, that The Collected Poems, despite frequent moments of promise unseized and unconsummated, seems an indispensable book about our American culture and the triumph and botch of its letters. Gerald Early is a professor of English and Director of the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, nominated this year for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Criticism. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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