is the urban Northern American Negro, his jobs, his play, his churches, his women. He can deal with various classes, but seems most at home with the poor. His text for Roy de Carava's rich photo essay,The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), is as total an example of Langston Hughes, of his bittersweet participation in the lives of his people, as anything else he has written. There seems to be no distance, really, between author and subject, no artist's detachment—which is doubtless the effect of very careful art.

His tone has that intimate, elusive, near-tragic, near-comic sound of the Negro blues, and is equally defiant of analysis. His theme is not so much white oppression, as the Negro's quiet resistance to it. His writings typify (and probably support) the famous and useful myth of Negro endurance—the knowing grin, half-smile half-smirk, of the bowing but unbeaten. They may thus not find favor with more militant Negroes, who regard the very myth of endurance as treacherously pacifist, supported if not invented by whites.

The "Simple" stories, one or two pages long, offer little barbed home truths about Harlem life, the cost of living, domestic unbliss, and especially the various ludicrous paradoxes of America's racial double standard. Jesse B. Simple is a sort of comic no-good (a stereotype turned to use, written by a Negro for Negroes) with perpetual lady troubles, cadging beers off the straight man who tells the stories in exchange for another of his twisty bits of folk wisdom about "the ways of white folks."

On the whole, Hughes' creative life has been as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso's, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There is no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if "different views engage" us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it's over. Much of the greatness of the three major Negro novelists derives from their singularity, their essential aloneness; Hughes' at least seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do. (pp. 144-47)

David Littlejohn, in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing By American Negroes (copyright © 1966 by David Littlejohn; reprinted by permission of Grossman Publishers), Viking, 1966.

Langston Hughes … has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. He often employs dialect distinctive of the black urban dweller or the rural black peasant. Throughout his career he was aware of injustice and oppression, and used his poetry as a means of opposing or mitigating them. Two early poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "I, Too, Sing America," testify to his abiding hope for the fulfillment of the American ideal—not only for black people, but for all the dispossessed of the land. Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet. (pp. 7-8)

Donald B. Gibson, "Introduction" to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Donald B. Gibson (© 1973 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey), Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 1-17.

Good Morning Revolution [compiled by Faith Berry] is a collection of selected articles, stories and poems by Langston Hughes. Most have not appeared in book form prior to Faith Berry's creative effort. The wealth of materials brings into sharp focus Hughes the poet, possessed of a powerful social, revolutionary vision, revolution in his work characterizing a creative concern for change in the social process that will guarantee maximum well-being for all men. Here the reader will see how he dared to dream of a sane society, how he focused his hope on creative change, how he yearned for humane treatment for blacks and other oppressed people….

No poet has evidenced deeper concern for the dignity of the masses, freedom, justice and the equality of the sons of man than he did. (p. 29)

James D. Tyms, in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1974 by The New Republic, Inc.), January 5 & 12, 1974.

Negro jazz, itself an obvious convention of the Negro folk—especially during and after their transplantation from the South to the North—almost seems to haunt all of the early verse of Hughes. It appears sometimes in the rhythm and the arrangement of the line. It appears sometimes in the language—which may be, upon occasion, veritably a jazz patois—and sometimes in the mood. And then in both Hughes's blues and his jazz there is almost always something else, a something else that links Hughes and his poetry, and the people presented in his poetry, to a convention seemingly universal in its hold upon ordinary people, all ordinary people. That something else is the technique of the ballad. [Read] Hughes's "When love is gone." Therein a voice speaks; a story is told to us by the character with this voice who informs us as we would be informed in a play. The method, the resort to dialogue or dramatic monologue, is the ballad technique, the same technique which may be found, for example, in a ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens." It is a favorite technique with Hughes. He does write lyric poems. But in his "lyric" persona he is often able to copy this social convention of the Negro folk, their use of the method of the ballad, to tell others how they feel. In this same "lyric" persona, also, he is able to reflect in subject matter the kind of happenings which ordinary Negroes tended to notice during the Renaissance and in theme the issues which those same Negroes tended to discuss in their familiar intercourse with each other.

In Hughes, indeed, the conventional life of the Negro folk is made to come alive, and that, of course, is the life of the Negro folk as they are. It is the life that, in America, has set the Negro masses apart from whites. Why do they act like that? signifies only that a middle-class white has observed a custom which he does not share. It signified for Hughes, who understood much of the why and managed often to incorporate insights into its nature in his verse, that he was, of all the Renaissance poets, the true New Negro of the Renaissance poet's definition. He made his poetry act like that…. [His was the] common touch, the touch that really mattered.

Perhaps, however, Hughes's touch may have been (for he was, of course, not perfect) in his art too much of precisely that, a touch. As he can be related to the ballad, he can also be related to Impressionism. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that all his poetry ever does is collect impressions. It is highly probable that, in all of Negro literature, he must be accorded the title of the Great Impressionist. Thereto, of course, attaches a limitation. Impressions tend to lack depth, if not also concentrated power. Hughes's impressions do come from the right places. They are taken by an artist who does not stand in his own light. And they do witness to the reality of a group experience of American life. Yet they are still impressions. Hughes was not a genius at synthesizing big things. He could, and yet he could not, quite see the whole forest as some writers do. It may have been his greatest lack and probably the reason he has never seemed as "serious" as writers like Ellison and Wright, or Tolson at his best. Even so he saw enough … to be a leading interpreter of the Negro in twentieth-century America and twentieth-century literature. (pp. 56-8)

Blyden Jackson, in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, by Blyden Jackson and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (copyright © 1974 by Louisiana State University Press), Louisiana State University Press, 1974.