Anne Sexton / The Witch's Life

Anne Sexton

THE WITCH’S LIFE

by Anne Sexton

When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood
whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.

I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming her.
My shoes turn up like a jester’s.
Clumps of my hair, as I write this,
curl up individually like toes.
I am shoveling the children out,
scoop after scoop.
Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?
Maybe I have plugged up my sockets
to keep the gods in?
Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
Yes. It is the witch’s life,
climbing the primordial climb,
a dream within a dream, 
then sitting here
holding a basket of fire.

Anne Sexton / The Black Art

 

Anne Sexton

THE BLACK ART 

by Anne Sexton

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren’t enough; as if machines and galleons
and wars were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.

Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we many,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.

Anne Sexton / Poetry

 

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

POETRY

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston, Massachusetts. One of the most popular poets of mid-20th century America, Sexton’s impressive body of work continues to be widely read and debated by literary scholars and cultural critics alike. According to Diane Hume George, “Anne Sexton’s poetry tells stories that are immensely significant to mid-twentieth-century artistic and psychic life. Sexton understood her culture’s malaise through her own, and her skill enabled her to deploy metaphorical structures at once synthetic and analytic … Sexton explored the myths by and through which our culture lives and dies: the archetypal relationships among mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, gods and humans, men and women. She perceived, and consistently patterned in the images of her art, the paradoxes deeply rooted in human behavior and motivation. Her poetry presents multiplicity and simplicity, duality and unity, the sacred and the profane, in ways that insist on their similarities—even, at times, their identity. In less abstract terms, Sexton made explicit the intimacy of forces persistently treated as opposites by the society she lived in.”

The daughter of a successful businessman, Sexton’s childhood was materially comfortable but not happy. Her relationships with her parents were difficult, perhaps even abusive. Sexton’s closest confidante was her maiden great-aunt. She attended boarding school and after graduation enrolled in Garland Junior College for one year. Sexton later described Garland as a “finishing” school. At age 19, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While Kayo was serving in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953, she gave birth to her first child and in 1955, her second. Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and after the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Other institutionalizations followed. Sexton struggled with depression for the remainder of her life. She committed suicide at age 46.

In treatment, her therapist encouraged her to write and in 1957 Sexton joined writing groups in Boston that eventually led her to friendships and relationships with the poets Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. As Sexton told Beatrice Berg, her writing began, in fact, as therapy: “My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and thinking and dreaming.” Her analyst, impressed by her work, encouraged her to keep writing, and then, she told Berg, she saw (on television) “I. A. Richards [a poet and literary critic] describing the form of a sonnet and I thought maybe I could do that. Oh, I was turned on. I wrote two or three a day for about a year.” Eventually, Sexton’s poems about her psychiatric struggles were gathered in her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), which recounts, as James Dickey wrote, the experiences “of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient’s slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old, previous self still demands.”

Sexton’s work is usually grouped with other Confessional poets such as Plath, Lowell, John Berryman, and W. D. Snodgrass. In an interview with Patricia Marx, Sexton discussed Snodgrass’s influence: “If anything influenced me it was W. D. Snodgrass’ Heart’s Needle. … It so changed me, and undoubtedly it must have influenced my poetry. At the same time everyone said, ‘You can’t write this way. It’s too personal; it’s confessional; you can’t write this, Anne,’ and everyone was discouraging me. But then I saw Snodgrass doing what I was doing, and it kind of gave me permission.” Sexton’s books after To Bedlam and Part Way Back included All my Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1966), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Love Poems (1969), the play Mercy Street (1969). Transformations (1972), a series of retellings of Grimm’s fairy tales is often described as her least overtly “confessional” and most feminist work. Sexton’s last published collection was The Death Notebooks (1974); posthumously published volumes included The Awful Rowing toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976), and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978).

Sexton’s work was enormously popular during her lifetime and she was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and an invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation, honorary degrees, and held professorships at Colgate University and Boston University. Despite her many achievements, critical discussions of her work tended to focus on the apparently autobiographical elements of her verse. Dickey’s admonishment of Sexton’s second book was somewhat typical: “Miss Sexton’s work seems to me very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera.” Yet Sexton’s canniness about the power of fiction, the uses of fact and imagination, and the poem—or poet—as essentially performance mean that no simple equations between poet and poem, life and art, can be drawn. In an early essay on both Bedlam and Pretty Ones, Beverly Fields argued that Sexton’s poetry is mostly misread. She contended that the poems are not as autobiographical as they seem, that they are poems, not memoirs, and she went on to analyze many of them in depth in order to show the recurrent symbolic themes and poetic techniques that she felt make Sexton’s work impressive. Recent scholars such as Gillian White have focused on Sexton’s manipulation of voice and audience to suggest her work warrants more, or different, scrutiny than it has previously received.

One of Sexton’s earliest champions, Erica Jong, reviewing The Death Notebooks assessed Sexton’s poetic significance and contended that her artistry was seriously overlooked: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems … But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist’s sense of where her inspiration lies …There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere … They write poems which any number of people might have written. When Anne Sexton is at the top of her form, she writes a poem which no one else could have written.”

POETRY

Pablo Neruda / For everybody

For everybody 

by Pablo Neruda
Translated by Jodey Bateman

Pablo Neruda / Para todos

I can't tell you quickly
What I ought to tell you,
Say man, pardon me, you'll know
That even though you don't listen to my words
I never took time off to weep or sleep
And that I've been with you when I couldn't see you
For a long time and I'll be there till the end.

I understand that many people are thinking,
"Say, what's Pablo doing?" I'm here.
If you look for me on this street
You'll find me with my violin
Ready to sing
And to die.

It's nobody's problem
Not for them, nor for you,
And if you listen well, in the rain,
You will be able to hear
That I come back and go away and stay.
And you'll know when I must leave.

If my words aren't heard
Don't doubt that I'm the one I was.
There is no silence that doesn't end.
When the moment arrives, wait for me,
And let everyone know that I'm coming
To the street, with my violin.

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Pablo Neruda / To wash a child

To wash a child

by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda / Para lavar a un niño

Only the most ancient love on earth
will wash and comb the statue of the children,
straighten the feet and knees.
The water rises, the soap slithers,
and the pure body comes up to breathe
the air of flowers and motherhood.

Oh, the sharp watchfulness,
the sweet deception,
the lukewarm struggle!

Now the hair is a tangled
pelt criscrossed by charcoal,
by sawdust and oil,
soot, wiring, crabs,
until love, in its patience,
sets up buckets and sponges,
combs and towels,
and, out of scrubbing and combing, amber,
primal scrupulousness, jasmines,
has emerged the child, newer still,
running from the mother's arms
to clamber again on its cyclone,
go looking for mud, oil, urine and ink,
hurt itself, roll about on the stones.
Thurs, newly washed, the child springs into life,
for later, it will have time for nothing more
than keeping clean, but with the life lacking.

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Pablo Neruda / Water

WATER

by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda / Agua

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Fracture by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

 

Fracture

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

West Africa, c. 15th century to 19th century

The men arrive. Slave ships are anchored.
The men arrive. The traders gather.
The men arrive. The traders march.
The men arrive. The war is waged.
The men arrive. The fire comes.
The men arrive. The people run.
The men arrive. The chase begins.
The men arrive. The dead abandoned.
The men arrive. The iron sounds.
The men arrive. The people march.
The men arrive. The sea. The sea.
The men arrive. The traders haggle.
The men arrive. The silver laughs.
The men arrive. The castle groans.
The men arrive. The door opens.
The men arrive. The water welcomes.
The men arrive. The mourning longs.
The men arrive. Our names shall scatter.

 

Beyoncé

'Beyoncé is not a woman to be messed with' – Lemonade review

Beyoncé’s imperious sixth album sees her turn her attention to her marriage, with witheringly powerful results

Alexis Petridis

Mon 25 Apr 2016 14.46 BST

D

ishearteningly billed as “a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self knowledge and healing” – a description that makes it sound like something agonisingly earnest you’d go out of your way to avoid at the Edinburgh Fringe – Beyoncé’s sixth solo album touches on a lot of potent topics. Quite aside from the presence of her much-discussed single Formation, a meditation on race that originally appeared in the middle of Black History Month, there are lyrical references to slavery, rioting and Malcolm X and a ferocious guest appearance by Kendrick Lamar that jabs at Fox News and police brutality and ends with something approaching a call to arms.

In an era when pop doesn’t tend to say a great deal, there’s obviously something hugely cheering about an artist of Beyonce’s stature doing this: she increasingly seems to view her success and celebrity as a means to an end rather than something to be maintained at all costs. Nevertheless, Lemonade is an album less about politics than something more personal. It’s more preoccupied with the state of her marriage than it the state of the world, overshadowed by her husband Jay Z’s alleged infidelity. If you want to compare her to an old soul legend, it’s more Here, My Dear than What’s Going On: for all its brilliance, Formation feels oddly tacked-on at album’s end, arriving after All Night, a track that sounds remarkably like a grand finale.

Given the amount of lurid media speculation about the Knowles-Carter union, you could have reasonably expected Beyonce to step discreetly around the subject of what you might call Hova’s legova, for fear of giving the gossip mags further fuel: perhaps a knowing allusion here and there, the odd bitter reference to the press intruding on her personal life. But no: in the film that accompanies the album, premiered last night on HBO, she does everything to express her displeasure at her husband’s behaviour short of appearing holding aloft a pair of scissors in one hand and Jay Z’s severed testicles in the other.

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She’s seen tearfully committing suicide, smashing things up with a baseball bat, destroying cars by driving over them in a monster truck and throwing her wedding ring at the camera, as well as reciting the alarmingly visceral poetry of Warsan Shire – best known as the author of that oft-quoted line about how no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark – much of which sounds less like the words you usually hear issuing from an R&B divas mouth than something the late Richey Edwards would have come up with around the time the Manic Street Preachers made The Holy Bible: “till the blood spills in and out of uterus, wakes up smelling of zinc, grief sedated by orgasm”.

The album itself is no less bracing in its approach than the film. “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” she sings on Sorry, shortly before threatening to leave and take their daughter with her. “Big homie better grow up”, she adds, a direct allusion to the title that Jay Z gave himself during his guest appearance on her 2003 single Crazy in Love. The music, too, slowly works itself up into a righteous frenzy of anger, shifting from the becalmed misery of opener Pray You Catch Me via via the sparse simmer of Hold Up – which rather wittily borrows its chorus from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s paean to undying devotion, Maps, and its hook from Andy Williams’ Can’t Get Used To Losing You – before finally boiling over on the fantastic Don’t Hurt Yourself: a ferocious, distorted vocal as commanding as anything she’s recorded, wrapped around samples from Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks and a guest appearance from Jack White. Indeed, without wishing to encourage someone towards the divorce courts, she’s so good at the hell-hath-no-fury stuff that it’s almost disappointing when the mood eventually lightens and she declares everything well in her marriage once more.

Not everything here works as well as that, or the weird, affecting mixture of defiance and vulnerability found on 6 Inch, a track on which she slurs and snarls about how rich, hard-working and desirable she is over ominous electronics, before her voice appears to crack as sings “come back, come back, come back”. Daddy Lessons’ curious blend of New Orleans jazz and country sounds uncomfortably like pastiche, while there’s something of a lull at the centre of the album, ironically the moment where the mood changes from bitterness and fury to something more forgiving and redemptive. The piano ballad Sandcastles isn’t a bad song as such, and it boasts a startlingly raw vocal that occasionally threatens to turn into a distraught howl, but it sounds a bit commonplace compared to what’s going on around it, not least the flatly astonishing Freedom, a dense swirl of sound containing everything from old Alan Lomax field recordings to 60s psychedelia from Mexico.

On Freedom, and indeed for much of Lemonade, Beyonce sounds genuinely imperious. She’s obviously not the only major pop star willing to experiment and push at the boundaries of her sound: that’s clearly what Rihanna and Kanye West were attempting to do on Anti and The Life of Pablo respectively. The difference is that those albums were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control. “This is your final warning,” she scowls on Don’t Hurt Yourself, “if you try this shit again, you lose your wife.” You rather get the feeling Jay Z should heed those words: on Lemonade, Beyonce sounds very much like a woman not to be messed with.

THE GUARDIAN

Patricia Lockwood's Sext Poems Will Make You LOL

 

Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood's Sext Poems Will Make You LOL

01/24/2012 03:28pm EST | Updated January 24, 2012

Once the love letter dominated the scene for writing your lover. But these days, nothing gets the blood pumping like a good sext. Like "Come over baby" ... or "I need you tonight" ... or "I am a living male turtleneck..." (Don't you dare judge us!)

Poet Patricia Lockwood, whose work has been published in the New Yorker and The Awl creates poems that operate with the shocking and true bizzarre revelations of a genius joke.

And then she discovered Twitter. As you will soon see, magic happened as a result of this fortuitous encounter. Her 'sexts' are X-rated scenarios that bring cartoon characters, inanimate objects, rappers and politicians into the love den. If you were looking for an entertaining entrance into the realm of sweet prose, we urge you to start here.

via Rhizome, who has a whole different but equally LOLworthy collection of sexy and weird texts.

HUFFPOST

Books and writers / Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

 Langston Hughes 

(1902-1967)

African-American poet, novelist, and playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walt Whitman, Hughes depicted realistically the ordinary lives of black people. Many of his poems, written in rhythmical language, have been set to music. Hughes's poems were meant "to be read aloud, crooned, shouted and sung."

"Rest at pale evening...

A tall slim tree...

Night coming tendrerly

Black like me.

(from Dream Variations, 1926)

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. His mother was a school teacher, she also wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a storekeeper. He had wanted to become a lawyer, but he had been denied to take the bar exam. Hughes's parents separated and his mother moved from city to city in search of work.

In his rootless childhood, Hughes lived in Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana and Buffalo. Part of his childhood Hughes lived with his grandmother. At the age of 13 he moved back with his mother and her second husband. Later the family settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where Hughes's stepfather worked in the steel mills. During this period Hughes found the poems of Carl Sandburg, whose unrhymed free verse influenced him deeply.

Langston Hughes

After graduating from a high school in Cleveland, Hughes spent a year in Mexico with his light-skinned father, who had found there a release as a successful cattle rancher from racism of the North. On the train, when he returned to the north, Hughes wrote one of his most famous poems, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers.' It appeared in the African-American journal Crisis (1921). As an adolescent in Cleveland he participated in the activity of Karamu Players, and published in 1921 his first play, The Golden Piece.

Supported by his father, Hughes entered in the early 1920s the Columbia University, New York. For the disappointment of his family, Hughes soon abandoned his studies, and participated in more entertaining jazz and blues activities in nearby Harlem. Disgusted with life at the university and to see the world, he enlisted as a steward on a freighter bound to West Africa. He traveled to Paris, worked as a doorman and a bouncer of a night club, and continued to Italy.

After his return to the United States, Hughes worked in menial jobs and wrote poems, which earned him scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His first play, The Gold Piece (1921) was published in the children's magazine The Brownies' Book. According an anecdote, Hughes was "discovered" by the poet Vachel Lindsay in Washington. Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel, where Hughes worked as a busboy, and dropped his poems beside the Lindsay's dinner plate. Lindsay included several of them in his poetry reading. It prompted interviews of the "busboy poet." Hughes quit his job and moved to New York City.

In 1929 Hughes received his bachelor's degree. He was celebrated as a young promising poet of the generation, publishing his poetry in Crisis (1923-24) and in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925). His first book of verse, The Weary Blues, supported by Carl Van Vechten, came out in 1926. "My news is this: that I handed The Weary Blues to Knopf yesterday with the proper incantations. I do not feel particularly dubious about the outcome: your poems are too beautiful to escape appreciation. I find they have a subtle haunting quality which lingers in the memory and an extraordinary sensitivity to all that is kind and lovely." (from Van Vechten's letter to Hughes in Remember me to Harlem, ed. by Emily Bernard, 2001)

Hughes valued Van Vechten's criticism and dedicated him his second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). Their correspondence, which lasted until Van Vechten's death in 1964, was published in 2001. The Weary Blues assimilated techniques associated with the secular music with verse, while its content reflected the lives of African-Americans. "Drowning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play. / By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light / He did a lazy sway... / He did a lazy sway..." (from 'The Weary Blues,' the title poem of the collection)

Hughes was considered one of the leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s  Not Without Laughter (1930), his first novel, Hughes wrote with the financial support of Charlotte Mason, a wealthy white woman. The book had a cordial reception and Hughes bought a Ford. He toured the colleges of southern America as a teacher and poet.

Noteworthy, Hughes was one of the first black authors, who could support himself by his writings. In the 1930s Hughes traveled in the Soviet Union, Haiti, and Japan. During his visit in the Soviet Union, to write the English dialogue for a film about black American workers, he had also an affair with an Afro-Chinese ballerina, Sylvia Chen, whose father Eugene Chen had served as a secretary to Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the Chinese republic and then worked as foreign minister of China. "He was such a jolly person and so natural," Sylvia recalled. "Langston had been a sailor and he walked like one; I remember him sloshing around in white corduroy pants in the middle of a Russian winter." While in Moscow, Hughes completed his translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems 'Black and White' and 'Syphilis' with the help of the critic Lydia Filatova. He also met Boris Pasternak and translated some of his poems.

'Goodbye, Christ,' a poem written during his world tour, was attacked by a right-wing religious group in the 1940s. Although Hughes decided to repudiate the work publicly, he also embraced radical politics, publishing a collection of satiric short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1943), and returned to satire and racial prejudices later in Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952) and Something in Common (1963). Hughes emphasized the importance of African culture and shared Du Bois's belief that renewal could only come from an understanding of African roots.

"My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.

I wonder where I'm gonna die,

Being neither white nor black?"

(from 'Cross')

Hughes's play The Mulatto (1935) premiered in 1935 with great success on Broadway at the Vanderbilt Theatre. To maximize sex and violence in the drama, the producer Martin Jones had added a scene in which a white overseer rapes the hero's sister. Alterations were made without Hughes's knowledge, but the fact that his first professionally developed play had opened on Broadway made him feel less disappointed with the production. Moreover, the same year Hughes won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which gave him some financial security for a period of time.

During the Spanish Civil War (1937) Hughes served as a newspaper correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American, reporting on the African American volunteers fighting for the Loyalists in the International Brigades. While in Madrid, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, with whom he attended bullfights. From circa 1942 onwards, Hughes made Harlem his permanent home, but continued lecturing at universities around the country.

Hughes wrote children's stories, non-fiction, and numerous works for the stage, including lyrics for Kurt Weill's and Elmer Rice's opera Street Scene, which opened at the Delphi Theatre on January 9, 1947, screenplay for the Hollywood film Way Down South with the actor Clarence Muse, and translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. Hughes's Christmas play, Black Nativity, has been produced every year by major black theaters. Street Scene was Rice's drama of tenement life in the lower east side of Manhattan. Chicago Daily News compared the Broadway musical adaptation to the Gershwin classic Porgy and Bess. Hughes also founded black theatre groups in Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles. 

When the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace was arranged in March 1949, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Hughes was one of the attendees. The event gathered left-leaning American artists of all disciples to meet their Soviet counterparts. On the final night of the conference, Dmitri Shostakovich played a piano arrangement of the Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden. Several days later Life magazine published a photo essay headlined "RED VISITORS CAUSE RUMPUS: DUPES AND FELLOW TRAVELERS DRESS UP COMMUNIST FRONTS," in which the attendees were said to be aiding the Communist cause. Hughes, who was a member-at-large of the National Council and one of the sponsors of the conference,  appeared as a "fellow traveler"  alongside Charles Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Parker, and a number of other delegates.

Hughes's inaccurate reputation for being a Communist dates from his poems in the 1930s. Lines from 'Goodbye, Christ' were presented as proof that he was a professed Communist: Goodbye, / Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah, / Beat it on away from here now. / Make way for a new guy with no religion at all— / A real guy named / Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin worker ME . . . ."In 1953, during the era of McCarthyism, Hughes tested to the Senate committee that he was not, and never had been, a Communist. He named no names, well aware of blacklisting and its effects on such radicals as Paul Robeson. In several of his poems, Hughes had expressed with ardent voice sociopolitical protests. He portrayed people, whose lives were impacted by racism and sexual conflicts, he wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness. But basically he was a conscientious artist, kept his middle-of-the road stance and worked hard to chronicle the black American experience, contrasting the beauty of the soul with the oppressive circumstance.

"Wear it

Like a banner

For the proud –

Not like a shroud."

(from Color, 1943)

In the 1950s Hughes published among others Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which included his famous poem 'Harlem,' A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956), and edited The Book of Negro Folklore (1958) with Arna Bontemps. Hughes's autobiographicals books include The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956). For juveniles he did a series of biographies, beginning with Famous American Negroes (1954). His popular comic character Jesse B. Semple, or "Simple," appeared in columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Hughes had met the prototype of the character in a bar. The ironic comments of the street-wise Harlem dweller were first collected into Simple Speaks His Mind  (1950). In the last Simple collection, Simple's Uncle Sam (1965), Hughes wrote: "My mama should have named me Job instead of Jesse B. Semple. I have been underfed, underpaid, undernourished, and everything but undertaken – yet I am still here. The only thing I am afraid of now – is that I will die before my time."

In his later years Hughes held posts at the Universities of Chicago and Atlanta. The poet also witnessed that doctoral dissertations already begun to be written about him – the earliest book on his work appeared already in the 1930s. At a White House lunch in 1961, hosted by President John F. Kennedy in honor of Leopold Sédar Senghor, the poet and president of Senegal specially mentioned Hughes as a major early source of inspiration. A Tennessee newspaper spoke about his presence in the White House as "an affront to every man and woman in this country, of all creeds." Hughes, with his gift of good humour, was an excellent dinner guest. Once when he sat next to the bored Carson McCullers, they had fun translating the French menu into jive English. 

Hughes never married and there has been unrelevant speculations about his sexuality. Several of his friends were homosexual, among them Carl Van Vechten, who wrote the controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926) – Hughes had recommended the choice of the title – but several were not. When the actress and playwright Elsie Roxborough had proposed Hughes in 1936, he pleaded poverty as his reason for bachelorhood. After black papers began to report that they were about to marry, Hughes stated in the Baltimore Afro-American, that "I am a professional poet and while poetry is so frequently associated with romance, there seems to be little compatibility between poetry and marriage, especially where one must depend on it to support a wife."

Langston Hughes died in Polyclinic Hospital in New York, on May 22, 1967, of complications after surgery. His collection of political poems, The Panther and the Lash (1967), reflected the anger and militancy of the 1960s. The book had been rejected first by Knopf in 1964 as too risky. Hughes's own history of NAACP came out in 1962; he had received a few year's earlier the NAACP'S Spingarn Medal.

Hughes published more than 35 books, he was a versatile writer, but he hated "long novels, narrative poems," as he once said. Although the Harlem Renaissance faded away during the Great Depression, its influence is seen in the writings of later authors, such as James Baldwin, who, however, criticized Hughes's poetic achievement. From the late 1940's through the 1950's Hughes revised under pressure his poems – many of them became less tough.

For further reading: To Make a Black Poet by S. Redding (1939); Langston Hughes by J. Emanuel (1967); Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation, ed. by T. O'Daniel (1971); A Biobibliography of Langston Hughes 1902-1967 by D.C. Dickinson (1972); Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics by R.K. Barksdale (1977); The Life of Langston Hughes: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad (1986); The Life of Langston Hughes, 1941-1967: I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad (1988); The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes by R. Baxter Miller (1990); Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. by Henry Louis Gates (1993); Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction by Hans Ostrom (1993); Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes by Floyd Cooper (1994; note: for ages 4-8); Free to Dream by Audrey Osofsky (1996; note: for ages 9-12); Langston Hughes by Joseph McLaren et al. (1997); Langston Hughes: Poet of the Harlem Renaissance by Christine M. Hill (1997); Langston Hughes: Comprehensive Reserach and Study Guide, ed. by Harold Bloom (1999); Remember me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, edited by Emily Bernard (2001); The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad (2002); The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914-1967, I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad (2002); Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture by W. Jason Miller (2010); Langston Hughes, edited by R. Baxter Miller (2013); Race in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, edited by Claudia Durst Johnson (2014); Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism by Mark Steven (2017) - See also: Countee Cullen. Harlem literature: (novels) Jean Toomer's experimental Cane (1923), Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928); Countee Cullen's One Way to Heaven (1932), Anna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936); (poems and plays) Abraham Hill's On Striver's Row (1933), Langston Hughes's Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). Harlem Renaissance, see This Was Harlem by Jervase Anderson (1981), Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr (1987). Note 1: Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' written on a train taking him to Mexico, has been among the most quoted of all poems by black poets. Note 2: According to the Kansas poet Eric McHenry, Hughes was born a year earlier than generally assumed. (The Guardian, 10 Aug 2018)

 

Selected works:

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers, 1921 (poem published in the journal Crisis)
• The Gold Piece, 1921 (play; publ. in The Brownies' Book)
  
• The Weary Blues, 1926 (incl. the poem Dream Variation; with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, 1929)
• Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927
• Not Without Laughter, 1930
• Dear Lovely Death, 1931
• The Negro Mother, and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931 (with decorations by Prentiss Taylor)
• Mule Bone, 1931 (with Zora Neale Hurston)
• Dear Lovely Death, 1931
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, 1932 (with illustrations by Helen Sewell)
• Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, 1932 (with illustrations by Prentiss Taylor)
• Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti, 1932 (with Arna Bontemps, illustrations by E. Simms Campbell)
• The Ways of White Folks, 1934
• Little Ham, 1935 (play)
• The Mulatto, 1935 (play)
• Emperor of Haiti, 1936 (play)
• Troubled Island, 1936 (play, with William Grant Still)
• When the Jack Hollers, 1936 (play)
• Front Porch, 1937 (play)
• Joy to My Soul, 1937 (play)
• Soul Gone Home, 1937 (play)
• Don't You Want to be Free?, 1938 (play)
• A New Song, 1938 (introd. by Michael Gold; frontispiece by Joe Jones)
• The Em-Fuehrer Jones, 1938 (play)
• Limitations of Life, 1938 (play)
• Little Eva's End, 1938 (play)
• The Organizer, 1939 (musical play, with James P. Johnson)
• The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940
• Shakespeare in Harlem, 1941 (with drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer)
• The Sun Do Move, 1942 (play)
• Way Down South, 1942 (screenplay)
• For This We Fight, 1943 (play)
• Freedom's Plow, 1943
• Jim Crow's Last Stand, 1943
• Laments for Dark Peoples, 1944
• Street Scene, 1946 (musical; lyrics by Langston Hughes, music by Kurt Weill, based on a book by Elmer Rice)
• Fields of Wonder, 1947
• Masters of Dew / Jacques Roumain, 1947 (translator, with M. Cook)
• Cuba Libre / Nicholas Guillen, 1948 (translator, with F. Carruthers)
• One-Way Ticket, 1949 (illustrated by Jacob Lawrence)
• The Poetry of the Negro, 1949 (ed.)
• Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950
• The Barries, 1950 (play)
• Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951 (incl. poem Harlem)
• Laughing to Keep from Crying, 1952
• The First Book of Negroes, 1952 (pictures by Ursula Koering)
• Simple Takes a Wife, 1953
• Famous American Negroes, 1954
• The First Book of Rhythms, 1954 (pictures by Robin King)
• Famous Negro Music Makers, 1955
• The First Book of Jazz, 1955 (pictures by Cliff Roberts, music selected by David Martin)
• Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955 (photographs by Roy DeCarava)
• I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956
• The First Book of the West Indies, 1956 (pictures by Robert Bruce)
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, 1956 (with Milton Meltzer)
• Selected Poems of Gabriel Mistral, 1957 (translator)
• Simple Takes a Claim, 1957
• Simply Heavenly, 1957 (play)
• Tambourines to Glory: A Novel, 1958
• Famous Negro Heroes of America, 1958 (illustrated by Gerald McCann)
• The Book of Negro Folklore, 1958 (ed. with Arna Bontemps)
• The Langston Hughes Reader, 1958
• Selected Poems, 1959 (drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer)
• The First Book of Africa, 1960
• The Best of Simple, 1961 (illustrated by Bernhard Nast)
• Ask Your Mama, 1961
• The Prodigal Son: A Gospel Song-Play, 1961
• Black Nativity, 1961 (play)
• Gospel Glory, 1962
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, 1962
• Five Plays, 1963 (plays, edited with an introd. by Webster Smalley)
• Jericho-Jim-Crow-Jericho: A Song-Play, 1963
• Something in Common, and Other Stories, 1963
• New Negro poets, U.S.A., 1964 (edited by Langston Hughes, foreword by Gwendolyn Brooks)
• Simple's Uncle Sam, 1965
• Soul Yesterday and Today, 1965 (play)
• The Book of Negro Humor, 1966 (selected and edited by Langston Hughes)
• Angelo Herdnon-Jones, 1966 (play)
• Mother and Child, 1966 (play)
• Outshines the Sun, 1966 (play)
• Trouble with Angels, 1966 (play)
• The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
• The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present, 1967 (ed.)
• Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, 1967 (with Milton Meltzer)
• Black Misery, 1969 (illus. by Arouni)
• Three Negro Plays, 1969 (with an introduction by C. W. E. Bigsby)
• Don’t You Turn Back: Poems, 1969 (selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, woodcuts by Ann Grifalconi)
• Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings, 1973 (edited and with an introd. by Faith Berry, foreword by Saunders Redding)
• Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti, 1977 (edited by Edward J. Mullen)
• Jazz, 1982 (3rd ed., updated and expanded by Sandford Brown)
• Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967, 1990 (selected and edited by Charles H. Nichols)
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1994 (edited by Arnold Rampersad)
• The Return of Simple, 1994 (edited by Akiba Sullivan Harper, introduction by Arnold Rampersad)
• Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, 1995 (edited by Christopher C. De Santis)
• Short stories, 1996 (edited by Akiba Sullivan Harper, with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad)
• The Pasteboard Bandit, 1997 (illustrated by Peggy Turley)
• Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems, 1998 (illustrated by Ashley Bryan)
• Sunrise Is Coming after While, 1998 (poems selected by Maya Angelou, silkscreens by Phoebe Beasley)
• Poems, 1999 (selected and edited by David Roessel)
• The Political Plays of Langston Hughes, 2000 (with introductions and analyses by Susan Duffy)
• Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, 2001 (edited by Emily Bernard)
• Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 2001-2004 (v. 1-6, 8-16, edited with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad)
• Let America be America again and Other Poems, 2004 (preface by John Kerry)
• My People, 2009 (photographs by Charles R. Smith Jr.)
• Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence, 2010 (edited by Shane Graham and John Walters, introduction by Shane Graham)
• I, too, Am America, 2012 (illustrated by Bryan Collier)
• Selected Letters of Langston Hughes Hardcover, 2015 (edited by Arnold Rampersad, David Roessel, Christa Fratantoro)
  
• Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond, 2016 (edited by Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson; with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley)

BOOKS AND WRITERS