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Religion In The Poetry Of Langston Hughes

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Juan Gonzalez
Professor Rivers Norton
English 102
December 11, 2014 Religion in the Poetry of Langston Hughes Langston Hughes’s poems “Song For a Dark Girl” and “Christ in Alabama” are poems that talks about religion. These poems use a lot of figurative language like imagery, symbolism, and metaphors to explain what Langston Hughes is talking about. The poem “Song For a Dark Girl” is a short poem that consists of three stanzas, and each stanza has four lines or quatrains. This poem also uses iambic trimeter as its meter of rhyme. Langston Hughes rhymes “me” and “tree” in the first part of the poem and repeats the rhyme in that last part of the poem. The first stanza to rhyme is: Way down south in Dixie …show more content…

Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. When Langston was small his parents split apart and he had to move with his grandmother. In fact, “While he was an infant his parents split and he moved to Lawrence, Kansas where he was cared for by his grandmother. His mother worked in Kansas City as an actress and his father practiced law in Mexico” ( “(James) Langston Hughes”, para. 2). Hughes moved to different places before he settled down and went to school. For example, Hughes moved briefly to Illinois before settling in Cleveland, Ohio where he attended Central High School. Hughes joined the track team and became Central High’s poet, writing poems for the school, and “published poems in the school newspaper” ( para. …show more content…

Accordingly, he lived in Mexico for a year with his father then attended Columbia University in New York for one year. He had several jobs and while in college he traveled the world and wrote many poems. In 1926, he published The Weary Blues which was Hughes’s first collection of poems entitled after a poem he wrote in 1925. After attending Columbia University Hughes attended other universities and decided to pursue writing. For example, “Hughes attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, earning a B.A. in 1929, In 1930 his first novel “Not Without Laughter” won the Harmon Gold Medal for Literature and Hughes then pursued writing as a career (“(James) Langston Hughes”, Para. 2). Some of Hughes’s most poetic influences in his writing career were Claude McKay, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Walt whitman. It was modernism, religion, and music which gave rise to Langston Hughes’s voice, a voice like no other. Before Hughes published his first novel in 1930 he published his second collection of poems in 1927 called Fine Clothes to the Jew. This collection of poems included the poem “Song For a Dark Girl” one of his darker poems that talks about death, love, race, and religion. Another poem he wrote about race and religion was “Christ in Alabama” a poem that Hughes published in

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