Hughes's Ask Your Mama conforms in many respects to [a certain] concept of jazz poetry. Throughout the twelve sections of the volume there are elaborate notes calling for the reciprocal interplay of music and poetry. The dominant theme that in "the Quarter of the Negroes" life is full of waiting and hesitating is stressed musically by "The Hesitation Blues," an old blues number used as a recurring leitmotif throughout Ask Your Mama. Moreover, the ringing indictments of social and moral injustice customarily found in the usual jazz poem are in full evidence in the volume. These are delivered with that peculiar Hughesian blend of anger, irony, and humor. (pp. 110-11)

[In] "the Quarter of the Negroes"—itself a phrase full of anger and irony—tribal togetherness has been replaced by a pervasive hatred of oppressive institutions, mandates, and regulations. This hatred has become the only "umbilical cord" tying one black person to another, but it provides no tribal shelter for the unwed mother, the unwanted child, the unemployed father, or for any of those who "just wait" in the "shadow of the welfare."

In other respects, Ask Your Mama is not a typical jazz poem. Certain passages are obscure and recondite and hence lack the direct clarity of statement usually found in the jazz poem. (p. 111)

Hughes also complicates his communication problem in Ask Your Mama by making excessive use of thematic discontinuity, a rhetorical ploy adapted from the bebop musical style and used with some effectiveness in blending a musical mode with a poetic style in Montage in 1951. But in the 1961 volume the message is frequently marred and coherence lost when there are sudden shifts of meaning and thematic breaks that snap the thread of meaning in a given passage and splinter off into elusive tangents of poetical comment which confuse rather than clarify. (p. 112)

[One] example of this kind of thematic discontinuity occurs at the beginning of the poem when the poet communicates how dismal and isolated and fragile is "the Quarter of the Negroes," whatever the country or climate…. Here life is flat and filled with the gray monotony that afflicts the poor. Yet there is a glittering exception to this state of affairs, and that is found in the life-style of Leontyne:

            Yet Leontyne's unpacking
            In the Quarter of the Negroes
            Where the doorknob lets in lieder
            More than German ever bore,
            Her yesterday past grandpa
            Not of her own doing—
            In a pot of collard greens
            Is gently stewing.

The reference in these lines is to the ironic juxtaposition of two cultures in the life-style of opera star Leontyne Price….

Having made this interesting observation about the clash of cultures in the lives of international stars like Leontyne Price, Hughes quickly shifts to what one critic calls his most crippling poetic mannerism—a listing of names of those well-to-do, successful blacks who are brought into view when an African diplomat is sent to visit the Quarter by the State Department. Then there follow five lines describing some problems blacks encounter when they move from one Quarter to another—from Harlem to Long Island. This is followed by a rather elusive and puzzling passage about Ralph Ellison and some other black notables setting sail for Ghana and Guinea, Africa's two newly independent nations. (p. 113)

Admittedly, if the intention of Hughes were to offer only a collage of his flitting impressions of life in the "Quarter of the Negroes" with no conclusive comment or coherent summarization, then skipping rapidly from one theme to another is as poetically fitting as the ingenious musical soloist who weaves an arabesque of sound around a single musical idea. As Jean Wagner points out in his discussion of Montage, however, the direct superimposition of the jazz mode on poetry does not always have felicitous results. One infelicitous result is the fragmentation of idea and mood. A somewhat more curious reader, for instance, would like to explore further the social and psychological implications of Leontyne Price's involvement in two conflicting cultures, or one would like to know more about the history behind the search for the black woman in the Negro quarters of Hispanic America. Is she only a symbol of the black woman raped or stolen by powerful masters or savored as one would savor "a little rum with sugar"? Or was she the one who, in fantasy or fact, was seen "fleeing with Lumumba"?

However, despite the lack of thematic continuity and despite the fact that in many places Ask Your Mama is reduced to a collage of quick and somewhat elusive impressions, there are occasional passages and images of impressive poetical power. (p. 114)

In many respects [Langston Hughes's final book of poetry, The Panther and the Lash,] is a somber book, devoid of racial comedy or humor. Within its pages there are no black folk characters luxuriating in the warm richness of the black experience; there are no happy blues singers, no Simples and no Madame Alberta K. Johnsons—no poems that celebrate the vibrancy and color of the black life-style. Instead, the emotional tone of the poems reflects the temper of the times. Between the publication of Ask Your Mama and Panther, America and the world had teetered on the brink of revolutionary racial change. (p. 119)

Where writers of other periods and cultures recollected past events and tried to divine their meaning, Hughes usually sought to assess the contemporary—to ferret out truths nestled in the context of current events and issues. His title, The Panther and the Lash—such a far cry from the black life-style titles given his other poetical volumes—suggests the bitter racial strife which was then shaking America from stem to stern. The "lash" symbolizes overt and covert white hostility to the black man's thrust for civil rights and first-class citizenship; and the "panther," political symbol of America's most militant racial group, symbolizes black anger and black separatism. Significantly enough, the volume is also subtitled "Poems of Our Times," and of the eighty-six, twenty-six had been written and published at an earlier time…. Intended at [the time of publication] to give an accurate appraisal of the brutal inequities of southern justice, the poems were still, in the 1960s, "poems of the times," suggesting that despite the passing decades, nothing much had changed. Similarly, several poems of racial protest, previously published in One-Way Ticket, Fields of Wonder, and Montage, acquired a new meaning and significance during the turbulent years of challenge and change in the 1960s. Thus, in his last volume of poetry Hughes earned an accolade bestowable on few of his fellow poets: he emerges as an artist who not only had the gift for trenchant analysis of the present but who, at the same time, could contemplate future vistas and read the wave of the future. In other words, even though he was the poet of rapid insight and fleet impressions, he rarely became so immersed in the particularities of a given moment that he forgot the future's debt to the present and the present's debt to the past.

Undoubtedly, the most effective poems in Panther are the new poems like "Junior Addict," the African poems, and poems on such contemporary happenings as the Birmingham church bombing and death on a Vietnam battlefield. All of these provide poetic comment on matters of the immediate moment, but the ideas contained therein have a certain thematic resiliency that will guarantee some relevancy for years to come. (pp. 121-22)

The six poems on Africa in Panther bear the broad title "African Question Mark." There are two kinds of poems in this group—three short poems full of generalized metaphorical comment on abstractions like race and freedom and hope and three longer poems reflecting the poet's direct confrontation with a specific racial event. The appropriateness of the juxtaposition of these two kinds of poems—poems of concrete statement and poems of abstract comment—has been observed above. All of the short poems were written earlier…. All three poems are reflective and inspirational in tone and seek to inculcate proper attitudes toward socially beneficial abstractions like freedom, color, justice, and racial equity. The other three poems reveal the other side of Hughes as a poet, for these are poems of direct comment on selected current events. Hence, their concern is with the particular, the concrete, and the contemporary. In both kinds of poems there is racial and social protest, but in the earlier short poems, the poet exhorts; in the three longer poems he excoriates…. In essence, the longer poems reveal Hughes at his impressionistic best, producing an impromptu art wrought out of the anger of the moment. (p. 123)

[A] poem in the volume reflecting an immediate, angry reaction to a gruesome racial incident is "Birmingham Sunday." Here again, the poet directly confronts an event that left most Americans silent and inarticulate in grief and disappointment. Evidently Hughes viewed himself in situations of this kind, as the spokesman-poet who was never permitted the luxury of emotional or esthetic distance from the consequences of man's inhumane behavior toward his fellowman. So, disciplined by his years of experience as a confrontation poet, he wrote … of the bombing of four little black children in a black church on a fateful Sunday morning…. Such a poem has a dramatic vigor and compressed emotion rarely found in the shorter poems on "Justice" and "Oppression." Yet the details of the poem underscore both the absence of justice and the presence of oppression. Poems like "Birmingham Sunday" underscore Hughes's ability to make a vigorous poetical pronouncement about those awesome and crushing events that leave ordinary people groping around in stunned silence. This ability makes him more than a "social poet"—a sobriquet used in Phylon in 1948 when he sought to describe his role and function as a poet. Actually, "Birmingham Sunday" [is a poem] of emotional confrontation. [It lacks] the blatant rhetorical violence of the confrontation poetry of the late 1960s, but [it contains] a strong man's forthright response to man's inhumanity to man. (pp. 124-25)