“What happens to a dream deferred?” is the opening statement of Harlem that grabs the attention of everyone who is reading this phenomenal poem. Of the two poems listed in this essay, this opening statement is more attention-grabbing and is a fantastic hook to being with. Harlem and Women Have Loved Before As I Love Now, are ideally comparable and contrastable. The meanings of the poems and the authors of the poems are some topics that are different in these poems. The style of the poems and length of the poems are the other topics that are the same and are comparable to this subject. Altogether, these two pieces of literature are actually intriguing and somewhat interesting. Looking for the meanings of the poems is the greatest challenge when reading a poem written a long time ago. Misinterpreting the meaning can cause some bigger issues in the dialect or if you someone wanted to write an analysis on the poem. In Harlem, only eleven lines are written with such greater meaning to the sentences. For example, “like a raisin in the sun?” could mean that the raisin is already supposed to be dry, like our dreams are supposed to be settle. As for Women Have Loved Before As I Love Now, has fourteen lines that have a higher intellectual and deeper meaning to the sentences. Such as, “Do suffer love; in me alone survive” could mean that love makes people crazy and some people suffer when they are in love. The author was suffering and the author felt alone in the depression they
One of Hughes most famous poems, “Harlem(Dream Deferred)” had a great impact by posing lots of questioning. According to critic Tom Hanson, this poem is just that simple because it gives a bunch of undesirable answers to the same question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Hanson also says how this poem refers almost completely to an unsolved problem (Hanson, Harlem). The poem gives four rather unpleasant interrogatives and one declarative answer followed by the sixth possibility, “Or does it explode?” which is supposed to be a question to make a reader really think. There are several ways to interpret the meaning of the final line, and the most sensible explanation is, the African American community is “deferring dreams” and in doing so their dreams explode in terms of the chance to act is gone. Some may say Hughes presented an unattractive view
The Harlem renaissance was filled with many emotional art that depicted hardship but also resilience. One of these poems that capture the unfortunate hardship of African Americans, is the poem Harlem Shadows By Claude McKay. In his poem he conveys one of the themes of the Harlem Renaissance using imagery, ethos, and repetition to portray the image in our head of the Harlem Renaissance.
The first poet I chose from the Harlem Renaissance was the American poet, Countee Cullen This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. (Brown, 2012) The work, Yet Do I Marvel, took a racial theme, lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit. The poem is stark and makes reference to Sisyphus and speaks of how life is a struggle up a never ending stair. It speaks to God as if to wonder why, knowing that God is benevolent he does not stop the unreasoning actions of brutes against, “flesh that mirrors him”, meaning the black race. (Brown, 2012) This line is important as it shows that the black consciousness is coming to recognition of their own worth taken
The two poems entitled “Harlem” and “The Weary Blues” where both written in the time if the Harlem renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was time when the people expressed their selves and the hardships and the reality of their times. The two poems are similar in a way. They both take place in Harlem and are both written by Langston Hughes. They both describe some type of sad but energetic tone, also known as blues.
"Harlem" is an open form poem. The poem consists of three stanzas that do not have a regular meter. To catch the reader's attention, the writer made sure that specific words and questions stood out. As a result, the lengths of the lines vary and certain syllables are stressed in every line. The first line in the poem: is the longest
All three of the poems discussed in this essay relate to the struggles suffered by African Americans in the late 18th century to the early 19th century in many different ways. They had to live under harsh
The Harlem Renaissance was a time where creativity flourished throughout the African American community. At the time many African Americans were treated as second class citizens. The Harlem Renaissance acted as artistic and cultural outlet for the African-American community. The Harlem Renaissance, otherwise known as “The New Negro Movement” was an unexpected outburst of creative activity among African Americans In the poems Harlem by Langston Hughes, America by Claude McKay, and Incident by Countee Cullen all use frustration and hope as reoccurring themes to help empower the African-American population and realize the injustices they face day to day. The Harlem Renaissance was a period marked by great change and forever altered the
During the 1920’s a new movement began to arise. This movement known as the Harlem Renaissance expressed the new African American culture. The new African American culture was expressed through the writing of books, poetry, essays, the playing of music, and through sculptures and paintings. Three poems and their poets express the new African American culture with ease. (Jordan 848-891) The poems also express the position of themselves and other African Americans during this time. “You and Your Whole Race”, “Yet Do I Marvel”, and “The Lynching” are the three poems whose themes are the same. The poets of these poems are, as in order, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude Mckay.
taste, hear and touch. ' Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun' this
Race plays a big part in this poem. He speaks on Harlem and its culture and this environment but also about mutual interest with people
The Harlem Renaissance was a wonderful allotment of advancement for the black poets and writers of the 1920s and early ‘30s. I see the Harlem Renaissance as a time where people gather together and express their work throughout the world for everyone to see the brilliance and talent the black descendants harness.
In our journey through life, we all have certain expectations of how we would like our lives to be. All of us strive to reach a certain level of self-actulization and acceptance. It could thus be said that all of us live a dream. Some of these individual dreams inevitably become the collective dream of many people. In "Harlem (A Dream Deferred)", Langston Hughes makes use of symbolism as well as powerful sensory imagery to show us the emotions that he and his people go through in their quest for freedom and equality. By using questions he builds the poem towards an exciting climax.
The great philosopher Plato once orated: “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. PBS defines the the Harlem Renaissance a “Cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars.” Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”Authors such as Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Colleen McElroy explore their cultural heritage through hard-hitting poetry.
When reading poetry, it can often be difficult to interpret the exact meaning of the poem the author was trying to transmit. A reader must learn to construe a poem without getting confused on what the author was trying to convey. We must scrutinize the work so that we may understand it better. In Langston Hughes “Harlem,” to analyze what this poem is trying to interpret we must understand line for line. The poem has eleven lines and all but one is asking a question. In each line except line seven, the last syllable stressed. Six of the seven sentences in the poem are questions. All of the sentences except the first and the last contain similes using like. Line three rhymes with line five; line six rhymes with line eight; line ten rhymes with line eleven. Lines four, seven, and eleven begin with or. Lines three, eight, and ten begin with like. The narrator is asking these questions to have the reader envision the lurid analogies to evoke the illusion of a postponed dream. One must also uncover the hidden meanings that stated in this poem. Written in 1951, Harlem addresses one of the most common themes of the time, inadequacies of the American Dreams of African Americans.
“The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s [whereas] Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism.” Both Harlem Renaissance and Postmodernism poetry shows the struggle that the people faced in their time frame. Each piece of poetry shows the reader what it would have been like to have lived in that era. The Harlem Renaissance poems show the pain the people endured during the century of segregation by using similes whereas the Postmodernism poems are told as a story where you further understand the characters well-being through the use