Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Towards a comparative American poetics
- Chapter 1 Transnational topographies in Poe, Eliot and St.-John Perse
- Chapter 2 Hybridity and the New World: Laforgue, Eliot and the Whitmanian poetics of the frontier
- Chapter 3 From Harlem to Haiti: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain and the avant-gardes
- Chapter 4 Signifying modernism in Wilson Harris's Eternity to Season
- Chapter 5 Beyond apprenticeship: Derek Walcott's passage to the Americas
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - From Harlem to Haiti: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain and the avant-gardes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Towards a comparative American poetics
- Chapter 1 Transnational topographies in Poe, Eliot and St.-John Perse
- Chapter 2 Hybridity and the New World: Laforgue, Eliot and the Whitmanian poetics of the frontier
- Chapter 3 From Harlem to Haiti: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain and the avant-gardes
- Chapter 4 Signifying modernism in Wilson Harris's Eternity to Season
- Chapter 5 Beyond apprenticeship: Derek Walcott's passage to the Americas
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
In an essay published six years before his death, Langston Hughes described his formative first encounter with modern American poetry at Central High School in Cleveland. “We read Sandburg, Millay, Masters, and other American poets who wrote of the things we knew about,” Hughes said,
we could identify their poetry with our lives … The aim of the teacher must be to stimulate the individual to create freely and individually – regardless of the great models of the past or present. Actually, the younger the student, the easier it is for him to express himself … If children wait to start writing in high school they're apt to be too inhibited to write freely … If they don't start writing until college, they'll try to be young T. S. Eliots.
It is well known that Hughes's poetics follows a line of development in twentieth-century American poetry that Pound denounced for its “general floppiness” – a line that extends from Whitman to Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, E. A. Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Lowell. Whitman would always be, for Hughes, “the greatest of American poets”; and, as early as 1927, he explicitly distanced himself, and all the other writers in Alain Locke's New Negro anthology, from Poe as the forerunner of Eliot's modernist craft.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms , pp. 93 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008