“Montage of a Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes

Introduction In a prefatory note to Montage of a illusion Deferred (1951), Langston Hughes composed about his creative leverages, concerns, and aspires in the publication, which he saw as a single verse rather than as a collection of verses. In terms of present Afro-American popular melodies and the sources from which it has progressed swing, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and bebop, this verse on contemporary Harlem, like bebop, is assessed by conflicting alterations, rapid nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken tempos, and routes occasionally in the manner of the jam meeting, sometimes the well liked recital, punctuated by the riffs, sprints, breaks, and distortions of the melodies of a community in transition. He published prolifically in a variety of genres but is possibly most broadly recalled for his innovative and influential jazz-inspired poetry. Hughes integrated the rhythm and feeling of blues and bebop melodies into his work and utilized colloquial language to reflect very dark American culture. Gentle wit and wry irony often belie the seriousness and magnitude of Hughes's topics, encompassing very dark Americans' ongoing pursuit—and consistent denial—of racial equality and the American dream of freedom. (Dickinson 50)

Discussion and Analysis

The volume seems to have jumped from a momentous occasion in his life: his going into his own dwelling in 1948 after a lifetime of rented or scrounged rooms and dwellings. (With the royalties from the 1947 musical play Street Scene, on which he had served as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice, he had purchased a row house in Harlem.) In September 1948 he wrote to a friend: “I have completed a new book I wrote last week!” Hughes called it “a full book-length poem in five sections,” and characterized it further as “a precedent shattering opus—also could be known as a tour de force.” (Dickinson 50)

If the aggressive discordances of bebop music as played by musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker shaped the form of the book, its central idea is that of the “dream deferred.” The dream had always been perhaps the central motif in Hughes's poetry, and especially the dream of political and social empowerment for blacks. But Hughes now faced the fact that the hopes that had drawn thousands of blacks to the to the north towns had commanded numerous of them to frustration, alienation, and bitterness. Some of these poems depict blacks still adept to hope and illusion, but the most powerful pieces raise the specter of scarcity, aggression, and death. In “Harlem,” a illusion deferred can “dry up,” or “fester,” or “crust and sugar over—or does it explode?” (Dickinson 50)

At diverse times witty, sardonic, ironic, documentary, loving, or tragic, the capacity feels on effectively every aspect of every day Harlem life, from the prosperous on Sugar high ground to the poorest folk dwelling down below; it touches on the inhabits of Harlem mothers, daughters, students, ministers, junkies, pimps, police, shop owners, homosexuals, landlords, and tenants; its aim is to render in verse a detailed ...