Hughes, Langston - Steven C. Tracy (essay date September 1988)
Steven C. Tracy (essay date September 1988)
SOURCE: "'Midnight Ruffles of Cat-Gut Lace': The Boogie Poems of Langston Hughes," in CLA Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, September, 1988, pp. 55-68.
[In the following essay, Tracy analyzes Hughes's use of the boogie-woogie form in five poems from Montage of a Dream Deferred.]
The influence of the blues tradition on Langston Hughes's poetry is by now an oft-discussed and readily accepted fact, although the depth and breadth of his employment of the tradition has not often been discussed with a similar depth and breadth. A close examination of a related sequence of Hughes's blues poems offers the opportunity to explore his fusion of oral and written traditions and to examine his tremendous skills as a literary-jazz improviser. That is not to suggest that Hughes's poems are spontaneous creations. Improvisation is normally thought of as a spontaneous act, but the jazz or blues musician's improvisations...
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