Compare and Contrast 'The Weary blues' and' The Negro Speaks of Rivers' by Langston Hughes

Background

Langston Hughes's first capacity of verse comprises a assortment of his verse that had emerged mostly in publications since the publication of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the Crisis in 1921. The name verse, in writing in 1923 but restrained from publication by Hughes, had won him the first reward in verse in the 1925 Opportunity publication challenge that assisted to launch the foremost stage of the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, after the accolades observance the agreeable white author Carl Van Vechten advanced Hughes about putting simultaneously a capacity of verse, and inside a couple of days protected for him a agreement with his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. The capacity emerged in January 1926 with an term paper, “Introducing Langston Hughes to the Reader,” by Van Vechten.

The seven parts of the capacity show the kind of Hughes's poetic interests. The first part, furthermore called “The Weary Blues,” displays only digressive leverage by the blues on Hughes's verse, except in the name verse and a verse for example “Blues Fantasy.” Instead the verses discover the built-up, jazzy, race-inflected air of Harlem in the early 1920s, the world of cabarets, vocalists, dancers, and prostitutes, with an occasional throwback to a previous age as in “Song for a Banjo Dance.

Comparison

The second part, “Dream Variations,” is affected thinly by rush feeling, but imagining usually takes the bard away from built-up and racial topics in the direction of environment, as in “Winter Moon.” In the third part, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the verses dispute contrary to racism in one way or another, either by claiming the attractiveness and dignity of blacks or by discovering the tragedy of racism in America, as in “Cross,” about miscegenation, or “The South.” The next ...