When Countee Cullen wondered whether some of Langston Hughes's poems were poems at all, he was not alone. Eugene F. Gordon and Thomas Millard Henry's description of The Weary Blues as a “doggerel” and “product of the inferiority complex” has already been noted. Hughes's second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), was unequivocally condemned by a section of the black press. The Pittsburgh Courier called “LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH.” The New York Amsterdam News called Hughes himself “THE SEWER DWELLER,” while the Chicago Whip named him “The poet lowrate of Harlem.” Even his friend, Wallace Thurman, almost agreed with his critics that Hughes wrote “trash” when he suggested that Langston Hughes “needs to learn the use of the blue pencil and the waste-paper basket.”

Thurman, nevertheless, offers one of the reasons why most of the Negro literati could not have approved of some of Langston Hughes's subject matter: the apparently anti-assimilationist hue of his treatment. Thurman writes: “He went for inspiration and rhythms to those people who had been the least absorbed by the quagmire of American Kultur, and from them he undertook to select and preserve such autonomous racial values as were being rapidly eradicated in order to speed the Negro's assimilation.”

Langston Hughes's early poetry contained such pieces as “Young Prostitute,” which is about a growing but already overworked harlot—the kind [that] come cheap in Harlem / So they say”; “To a Black Dancer in ‘The Little Savoy,’” which focuses on a girl whose “breasts [are] / Like the pillows of all sweet dreams”; “The Cat and the Saxophone,” that jerky sputtering of a tipsy love-thirsty couple that knocked Countee Cullen “over completely on the side of bewilderment, and incredulity”; and the poem about a prostitute in a British colony—possibly in Africa—Natcha. She offers love “for ten shillings.” All these are raw slices of life cut from Harlem and Africa with no palliative or the Freudian “incitement premium” offered. The pretty and sexy “wine-maiden” drunk with “the grapes of joy” in “To a Black Dancer in ‘The Little Savoy’” is, possibly, only a reflection (a literary transplant) of a young black woman whom the poet must have met, one night, in the cabaret—The Little Savoy.

Thus the source of Hughes's trouble with some black critics was not that he was not being Negro but that his work was too Negro self-expressing. He threw wide, to use Countee Cullen's words, “every door of the racial entourage, to the wholesale gaze of the world at large” in defiance of the black middle-class assimilationist “code” of decency.

The last paragraph of his reply to George S. Schuyler's article “The Negro-Art Hokum” is an adequate definition of what he and many of his close associates—especially his co-founders of Fire—were trying to do:

We young Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temple for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

George S. Schuyler, who believed that “the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon,” had contended that there could be nothing “expressive of the Negro soul” in the work of the black American whose way of life was hardly different from that of other Americans. He is, Schuyler argued, “subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white Americans. He is not living in a different world as some whites and a few Negroes would have us believe. When the jangling of his Connecticut alarm clock gets him out of his Grand Rapids bed to a breakfast similar to that eaten by his white brother across the street … it is sheer nonsense to talk about ‘racial differences’ as between the American black man and the American white man.” Therefore any attempt on the part of the black American to aim at the production of any art distinctively Negro borders on self-deception, for “Negro art” belongs somewhere else. It “has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.”

Langston Hughes's response was direct in spite of the young poet's initial faux pas when he strained logic by equating a desire “to be a poet—not a Negro poet” with a wish “to be white.” Without repudiating the Americanness of the Afro-American, he defined how a work of art by a black American can be Negro, the artist's Americanness notwithstanding. The basis is his choice of object and of manner of imitation. The black artist stands a good chance of capturing the Negro soul if he looks for his material not among the “self-styled ‘high-class’ Negro[es],” but among “the low-down folks, the so-called common elements.” These, Hughes claimed, unlike the type of Negroes who have “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven,” “furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations.” They could easily be found “on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else.”

To construct works of art distinctively Negro with these elements, Hughes argued, all the Afro-American artist has to do is to bring to bear on them “his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.” It is this marriage between Negro material and the artist's “racial individuality,” as a basis for the creative process, that makes Jean Toomer's Cane and Paul Robeson's singing “truly racial” or expressive of the Negro self. He concluded: the development of this type of black self-expressive art was his and his close associates' prideful aim.

The New Negroness of Langston Hughes resides, therefore, in one attitude of the mind: race-pride. It supports and is often indistinguishable from his African motif; it is at the base of his application of the Negro folk treatment to Negro folk material.

Langston Hughes and his associates were not the first Afro-Americans to apply folk treatment to Negro folk material. James Edwin Campbell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Daniel Webster Davis, J. Mord Allen, the early James Weldon Johnson, and many others had written about the “common [black] elements” in Negro dialect. Not all their works, however, anticipated the self-pride and self-expression of the Harlem Renaissance literature. Many of them belonged to the minstrel tradition. In many cases, although their subject looked black and their language of creation supposedly was Negro, their end product lacked the Negro soul. Created purposely for the delectation of the white folk whose self-aggrandizement they also sought to sustain, these earlier works comprised mainly those Negro elements which experience had proved to be pleasurable to the white ego. They were, essentially, attempts to recreate the white man's concept of the black man. In other words, the Negro artists often borrowed their black material from the white man's imagination. With regard to their form, the dialect (folk) poems most often differed from their literary counterparts only in orthography. In some cases their folk treatment did not go beyond a distortion of English syntax.

Consequently, when Langston Hughes arrived on the scene the process he was to adopt was almost nonexistent, even though some critics confused it with the old minstrel tradition and feared that it might cater to the old self-aggrandizement of the white folk. Drawing his subjects straight from real (as distinct from imagined) Negro folks, he experimented with the blues and jazz forms and employed the real dialect of real Negroes, mainly of Washington, D.C., Harlem, and the South Side, Chicago. Among the results of his first experiments are “The Weary Blues,” “Jazzonia,” and “Negro Dancers”—poems which are important not only because they are three of his best, but also because they were the very ones that he showed to Vachel Lindsay at the Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C., in December 1925. They set the tone for much of Langston Hughes's later poetry; as such they deserve a closer look.

Thomas Millard Henry was not completely wrong when he applied the phrase “a little story of action and life” to “The Weary Blues,” which earned Hughes the forty-dollar first prize in the poetry section of Opportunity's 1925 contest. An attempt to paint a folk creator of the blues in the very action of creation, the poem is essentially a process analysis, a rhetorical pattern which is very close to narrative. Its title notwithstanding, it is hardly a true imitation of the folk blues—a genre which James Weldon Johnson rightly described as a “repository of folk-poetry.” At least its form does not agree with the description of the blues pattern as given by Langston Hughes himself in 1927:

The Blues, unlike the Spirituals, have a strict poetic pattern: one long line repeated and a third line to rhyme with the first two. Sometimes the second line in repetition is slightly changed and sometimes, but very seldom, it is omitted. The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.

Yet “The Weary Blues” is a successful poem. The monotonous, and therefore boring, sentence patterns with very little or no attention to syntax combine with the folk artist's “droning,” “rocking,” and swaying as well as the implication of the “old gas light,” the “poor piano,” and the “rickety stool” to underscore the dreariness of the player's life. We feel his blues-infected soul not only in the “sad raggy tune” squeezed out of the “poor” moaning piano, or in the “drowsy syncopated tune” and “mellow croon,” but also in his helplessness vis-à-vis the song which rises in him and overflows, almost unaided, his tired voice in the semi-darkness of “an old gas light.” The mood is that of “despondency.” It is the mood of blues, an art form which Hughes thought was more dolorous than the spirituals because its sorrow is untempered by tears but intensified by an existentialistic laughter.

With regard to its coming too close to being an ordinary narrative, “a little story of action and life,” it is even doubtful that it could have done otherwise, since the blues as a poetic expression is an exposé of an active experience physically lived through, or being contemplated mentally or internally ongoing. Witness the movement of the famous “St. Louis Blues” or the sequential approach of “Hard Times Blues.” Unexpected interjections of moods and sentiments may disturb the logical sequence of the action being rehearsed or being lived mentally; they hardly disrupt the basic layout of the experience. “What's stirrin', babe?” which, incidentally, is a good example of the blues in one of its earlier stages of development, will make this point clearer:

Went up town 'bout four o'clock;
                              What's stirrin', babe; stirrin', babe?
When I go dere, door was locked:
                              What's stirrin', babe, what's stirrin', babe?
Went to de window an' den peeped in:
                              What's stirrin', babe; stirrin', babe?
Somebody in my fallin' den—
                              What's stirrin', babe; stirrin', babe?

The question “What's stirrin', babe?” is interjected in the first stanza to reactualize the past experience and underscore the speaker/singer's emotion: a combination of surprise and jealousy. Yet the basic structure of the action is not destroyed, as can be seen if we relocate the interjecting question where it really belongs—after the first line of the second stanza: that is, when the speaker/singer really sees something “stirrin'” in his “fallin' den [his bed].”

It is because the blues is an account of an experience lived, or an experience being lived, or an experience that will be lived, that “it was assumed,” as LeRoi Jones correctly points out, “that anybody could sing the blues. If someone had lived in this world into manhood, it was taken for granted that he had been given the content of his verses.” Langston Hughes sees the relationship between the blues and the experience of its author in his account of the singing habit of one George, a joy-seeking wretch who shipped out to Africa with him. According to Hughes “he used to make up his own Blues—verses as absurd as Krazy Kat and as funny. But sometimes when he had to do more work than he thought necessary for a happy living, or, when broke, he couldn't make the damsels of the West Coast believe love worth more than money, he used to sing about the gypsy who couldn't find words strong enough to tell about the troubles in his hard-luck soul.” Janheinz Jahn is also aware of this storifying nature of the blues when he says that “the texts of the blues follow the African narrative style almost entirely.” This feature itself is not surprising since the blues is only a distant descendant of West African folk songs through the Afro-American work songs, saddened by the black man's experience in the New World.

Whatever the case, “The Weary Blues” has something which can pass as the blues in its own right: one aspect is shown by the speaker's imitation (in the line “He did a lazy sway. … / He did a lazy sway. …”) of the rhythm which the folksinger is trying to create; a second blues quality appears in the last stanza of the lyric that the pianist is in the process of composing. This stanza approximates the blues form to the extent that it could be extracted and sung as an independent folk song:

I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied—
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died.

As a matter of fact, Langston Hughes confesses in his autobiography that it is a real “blues verse”—the first he “ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when [he] was a kid.”

It conforms with the three-point movement of a typical blues stanza: affirmation, reaffirmation, determination. Above all, it obeys the rule of repeated lines as well as the a b a b c b rhyme scheme which some of Hughes's later and more confident attempts follow, as evidenced by this stanza from “Bad Man”:

I'm a bad, bad man
Cause everybody tells me so.
I'm a bad, bad man
Everybody tells me so.
I take mah meanness and ma licker
Everywhere I go.

Or by the third stanza of “Po' Boy Blues”:

I fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
Fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
She made me lose ma money
An' almost lose ma mind.

Or by the last stanza of “Hard Daddy”:

I wish I had wings to
Fly like de eagle flies.
Wish I had wings to
Fly like de eagle flies.
I'd fly on ma man an'
I'd scratch out both his eyes.

And by this stanza from “Bound No'th Blues”:

Goin' down de road, Lawd,
Goin' down de road.
Down de road, Lawd.
Way, way down de road.
Got to find somebody
To help me carry dis load.

Just as “Aunt Sue's Stories” is a celebration of the oral tradition—that bastion of black civilization and cultural experience—and a product of the oral tradition, “The Weary Blues” is both a folk poem and a dramatization of the creation of a folk poem.

This is also true of the systematic, though disorganized, rhythm of “Jazzonia,” which is modeled on jazz music whose flexible structure, like African musical habits from which it takes at least part of its roots, makes for improvisations capable of provoking a sigh or a smile or both. The speaker manipulates the rhythm and the imagery to create the gay, urgent, and often grotesque atmosphere inherent in jazz music. The refrain with its exotic dazzling tree (of life in the Garden of Eden) and river (Nile) heightens the gaiety and seeks to stabilize the tempo as well as the theme. Yet like a real piece of jazz music whose rhythm and duration are unpredictable, it comes to an abrupt end at a moment when we want more of it—not only because we want to know more about “Eve's eyes” and Cleopatra's “gown of gold” (the focus of the fourth stanza and the frame of reference of the refrain) but also because the very two lines that crash-stop the piece have started with a promise of at least two other lines to follow (since they are modeled on the first two lines of the second stanza, which has four lines):

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play

The total effect is that of joy and sorrowful disappointment, two opposing moods which adequately reflect those of the dancing girl—an embodiment of Eve and Cleopatra, their initial joyous allurements and eventual sorrows combined. Like real American Negro jazz, “Jazzonia” has an undercurrent of sorrow.

Indeed this could be said of most of Langston Hughes's jazz poems before and after 1926. Witness the mournful pessimism beneath the otherwise Dionysian gaiety of “Harlem Night Club” and the frustration that boils under the hilarious “Brass Spittoons.” Jazz is like “that tune” in “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” “that tune / That laughs and cries at the same time.” Langston Hughes had earlier indicated this happy-sorrowful nature of jazz, which he tried to capture in most of his jazz poems:

They say a jazz-band's gay.
Yet as the vulgar dancers whirled
And the wan night wore away,
One said she heard the jazz-band sob
When the little dawn was grey.

“Negro Dancers,” the last of the poems which Hughes showed to Vachel Lindsay, is also a folk material effectively treated in a folk manner in spite of the jarring threat implicit in the two-line third stanza:

White folks, laugh!
White folks, pray!

The rhythm this time is that of the Charleston. With a combination of short lines made up mainly of monosyllabic words and gasping punctuation, the speaker captures the sprightful rhythm of the folk dance as well as the urgency of the folk dancer's announcement. The second and third stanzas, with their less-hurried tempo and the double entendre of a pessimistic speaker, highlight the gaiety of the rhythm of the folk dance and cast a shadow (of doubt) on the exuberance of the folk dancer. The total effect, once again, is joy with an undercurrent of sorrow—a combined reflection of the folk dancer's apparent happiness and the pessimism of the speaker who, beneath the joy of the folk dancer's publication of “two mo' ways to do de buck,” seeks to uncover what looks like “I'm laughin' to keep from cryin'.” Yet “Negro Dancers” is a successful imitation of the Charleston—that folk dance whose roots several students have followed beyond the Afro-American community in Charleston, S.C., into Africa.

When Langston Hughes wrote his poems or when he used the jazz and the blues forms, he thought of his manner of imitation as Afro-American, as distinct from African. Nevertheless, it could safely be assumed that he would not be shocked by the idea that his poetry reveals faint rhythms of African tom-toms and African musical habits, such as the call-and-response technique. For one thing, his “POEM For the portrait of an African boy after the manner of Gauguin” sees the rhythm of the tom-tom as a component of the African blood:

All the tom-toms of the jungles beat in my blood,
And all the wild hot moons of the jungles shine in my soul.
I am afraid of this civilization—
                    So hard,
                                        So strong,
                                                            So cold.

The Afro-American, we learn from another poem, “Afraid,” also is lonely and afraid “among the skyscrapers”—symbols of the non-African Western civilization—“as our ancestors” were lonely and afraid “among the palms in Africa.” As another blood component, Hughes often hears a jungle timbre and feels a jungle rhythm in jazz music and jazz dance, as in “Nude Young Dancer.” The young dancer, like the “night-veiled girl” of “Danse Africaine,” obviously owes part of the effectiveness of her performance to her connection with the jungle.

Unlike many other Afro-Americans who used African motifs in their works, Hughes did not have to rely solely on secondhand exotic pictures of Africa in books and on celluloids. He had been physically in contact with the black continent before publishing—if not writing—most of his poems that use Africa either as a motif or as a reinforcing image in his black-is-beautiful theme. Even if he had written them before visiting Africa, it is a mark of his satisfaction with the accuracy of his conception of the ancestral continent that the poems were published after he had had the opportunity of knowing, to use his own words, “the real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.” The attitudes of his speakers towards Africa could, therefore, be credited with a measure of sincerity instead of being simply discarded as another faddish moonshine of the Jazz Age.

Admittedly, Hughes could not always resist the temptation of trying to soothe the thirst in the 1920s for the exotic and the primitive. Some of his autobiographical short stories reveal a sacrifice of realities on the altar of masturbatory exoticism. “Luani of the Jungles,” a story which appeared in the November 1928 issue of Harlem magazine, is a good example.

In this piece, Hughes's first-person narrator describes the physical milieu where the action takes place as accurately as his white interlocutor depicts the reception given to Luani when she returns from Europe:

There a hundred or more members of the tribe were waiting to receive her,—beautiful brown-black people whose perfect bodies glistened in the sunlight, bodies that shamed me and the weakness under my European clothing. That night there was a great festival given in honor of Luani's coming,—much beating of drums and wild fantastic dancing beneath the moon,—a festival in which I could take no part for I knew none of their ceremonies, none of their dances. Nor did I understand a word of their language. I could only stand aside and look, or sit in the door of our hut and sip the palm wine they served me.

The story, however, moves irrecoverably towards the exotic as the white man describes Luani's behavior in her home village in Nigeria, and portrays her as going “hunting and fishing, wandering about for days in the jungles.”

Firstly, it is doubtful that women among any tribe in Nigeria “went hunting and fishing … with members of the tribe” in the 1920s—at least not a chief's daughter who had lived in England and France. Secondly, it is doubtful that a Nigerian girl like Luani would leave her husband's bed of a night to walk about naked, making love with another man under palm trees—even if her husband were impotent. Perhaps a woman can, in 1981 Nigeria, tell her husband whom she has cheated sexually that “a woman can have two lovers and love them both.” A society which had not greatly evolved from what it was in the days of Chinua Achebe's Okonkwo would have fallen completely apart before being required to listen to such an outrageous claim.

Indeed it strains credulity to accept the idea of a white man's going to live with an African wife in her African “jungle” village. A more realistic picture is that which emerges from Langston Hughes's own account of the experience of the mulatto Edward and his black African mother. The mother was only a house servant of a white man who lived at a special place reserved for whites. When the white man returned to England, “the whites inside the compound naturally would have nothing to do with them [Edward and his mother], nor would they give him [Edward] a job, and the Negroes did not like his mother, because she had lived for years with a white man, so Edward had no friends in the village, and almost nobody to talk to.”

Nevertheless, the attitudes of Langston Hughes's speakers towards Africa should be credited with a measure of sincerity. Unlike the narrators of his “African” short stories (and they are too few to be significant) who tend to subscribe to the exotic image of Africa, most of them who speak of or allude to Africa were created by Hughes before 1926. It was during the post-1926 period that the genuine Afro-American's attempt to express himself and his ancestral heritage was falling into decadence as some New Negro writers consciously sought to please their audience instead of seeking to express their dark selves. Thus, if Langston Hughes had chosen after 1926 to repudiate the articles of his “manifesto” completely (and he did not do so) his action could not have affected most of his poems that deal with Africa either directly or indirectly. Besides, the inaccuracies of his speakers notwithstanding, the picture of Africa that emerges from those poems is more authentic than the images that emerge from the writings of many other New Negro authors. For instance, unlike Countee Cullen's romantic Africa where, as in Heritage, “cinnamon tree” grows, Langston Hughes's Africa grows “palm trees,” as in “Afraid.”

It is this considerably high degree of accuracy in the conception of the face of Africa that separates Hughes's “African” poems from those of his fellow New Negroes (who used the same motifs) without, however, depriving them of the basic New Negro awareness of the Dark Continent's presence in the Afro-American's life.

Hughes's black Americans, whose attitudes his first-person speakers voice, have no illusions either of the remoteness of Africa both in time and space or of their unquestionable right to full American citizenship. They all “sing America”; they are all Americans, the darkness of their skins notwithstanding. Even in the poem “Dream Variation”—where the speaker longs “to fling [his] arms wide / In some place of the sun, / To whirl and to dance / Till the white day is done. / Then rest at cool evening / Beneath a tall tree / While night comes on gently”—it is America that is being sung. The dream is a wish fulfillment. Unable to belong effectively to his live society, the speaker wishes for a place where he could relax. The motivation of this “dream” is the motivation of the numerous back-to-Africa movements. The dream would not occur if the live situation were not painful. This can also be said of “Our Land,” which the poet tellingly subtitled “Poem for a Decorative Panel”—fine art, another channel of wish fulfillment. As a reaction to “this land where life is cold,” the speaker wishes for a dreamland which exists nowhere on this planet.

Nonetheless, Langston Hughes's Afro-Americans recognize and affirm their relations with Africa, whose heritage and experience they cherish and revere as sources of pride-inspiring characteristics. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” the characteristic is stability which, ironically, has developed from the instability of the speaker's experience. The impermanence of his situation (as an enslaved African), from life on the Euphrates of ancient history to the Mississippi of relatively modern times, has toughened his mind and skin, making him as stable as the rivers whose rise and fall in importance have not destroyed them: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” He could as well say as a mother says to a son in a later poem:

I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

(“Mother to Son”)

Stability through the instability of Africa and her sons is also the point of “Proem,” which, in a way, resembles “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The blackness of the speaker's skin relates him directly to the blackness of night and of the depths of Africa. Just as the blackness of night and of the depths of Africa is an unchangeable fact, so also is the speaker's blackness with all its fortitude already tested and confirmed. He IS. His blackness, derived from Africa, has exposed him to a toughening experience. He IS now as real as his experience WAS.

In many other poems by Hughes the inherent characteristic of the Afro-American African ancestry is beauty. We see this in “When Sue Wears Red,” a poem which Hughes wrote at the age of seventeen about a seventeen-year-old “brownish girl” who had recently arrived from the South, and sometimes “wore a red dress that was very becoming to her.” Susanna Jones, beautiful in her “red dress,” is portrayed as a reincarnation of a dead African queen, possibly Cleopatra in view of her obvious coquetry or tantalizing charm which “burns … a love-fire sharp like pain” in the speaker's heart. The piece “Poem,” which was first published in the June 1922 number of The Crisis, is a direct assertion of the beauty of the black race:

The night is beautiful
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

In most of Hughes's poems night is interchangeable with blackness; the two words as well as sun often relate the subject in focus to Africa as the foundation or the starting point of black life and experience in America.

Langston Hughes's speakers are hardly loud in their acknowledgment of their relationship with Africa. When they try to be, as in “Afro-American Fragment” (which, though published in 1930, is a good summary of the speakers' attitudes towards Africa), their voices tremble with an anti-African note. The repetition of the first three lines (“So long, / So far away / Is Africa”) at the end of the first stanza (and, indeed, at the end of the next and only other stanza) underscores the speaker's wish that his disassociation of himself from Africa be taken seriously. Nevertheless, beneath the disassociation is a strong undercurrent of affirmation of the speaker's kinship with “Africa's Dark Face.” It is one thing to stop the “drums”; to muffle the sound already produced is another. While the production of drum sounds requires a conscious and, under normal conditions, a voluntary effort, resurgence of the sound after the process that produced it has been discontinued can take place in spite of the feeling and preoccupation of the person in whose mind it has been registered.

Langston Hughes in the 1920s wrote poems like “Winter Moon,” “March Moon,” “Sea Calm,” “Cross,” “The Jester,” and “The Minstrel Man.” These are either nonracial, or extremely racial. When nonracial, they contain nothing that could be described as distinctively Negro. Splendid as it is, for instance, the three-line “Suicide's Note” could have been written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss

When extremely racial, they assume various aspects of the writings of the Old Negro authors—from the Niagara fume of “The South,” which could have come from W. E. B. Du Bois's pen to the Old Negro Christlike virtue of “The White Ones.”

Based on the experience of the black man in the New World though these poems are, they did very little or nothing to affirm with pride the Negro self. This assignment was left for the poems where Hughes considerably exploited the Negro folk material and folk medium of creation or acknowledged, even if ambivalently, his ancestral heritage as it related to Africa.

These were the basis of his New Negroness. He expressed the dark self of the Afro-American without for the most part trying to please or displease the black man or his white brother. “With quiet ecstatic sense of kinship with even the most common and lowly folk,” as Alain Locke puts it, he “discovers in them, in spite of their individual sordidness and backwardness, the epic quality of collective strength and beauty.” These were also the basis of his originality, which, ironically, laid him open to attacks, especially from black scholars and critics who, with Benjamin Brawley, saw his themes as “unnecessarily sordid and vulgar” and his manner of treating them as a good example of “imperfect mastery of technique.”

This, however, was mainly a cover for the belief that Hughes was only catering to the pleasure of white faddists who had allegedly influenced him in a bad way. Even Wallace Thurman, his fellow traveler on the bandwagon of “Fire,” thought as much when he charged that “urged on by a faddistic interest in the unusual, Mr. Hughes has been excessively prolific, and has exercised little restraint.

The strongest and most direct charges, however, came from Benjamin Brawley in his article “The Negro Literary Renaissance,” published in the Southern Workman, and from Allison Davis, who claimed that “the severest charge one can make against Mr. Van Vechten is that he misdirected a genuine poet, who gave promise of a power and technique exceptional in any poetry,—Mr. Hughes.” Both of them drew immediate responses, one from Carl Van Vechten and the other from Langston Hughes.

Benjamin Brawley had implied that Van Vechten had influenced Langston Hughes's first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, which contains a preface written by Carl Van Vechten. In his reply, therefore, Van Vechten tried to show that that could not have been possible:

Unfortunately for his argument, however, the opening part of his statement does not agree with established facts from other reliable sources—including his own introduction to the book in question: The Weary Blues. He met Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen for the first time on November 10, 1924, the very day Langston Hughes returned from sea, and was introduced to him by Walter White at a party given by the NAACP. He met and spoke with Langston Hughes again a year later at the 1925 Awards dinner of Opportunity, where the poem “The Weary Blues” was awarded the first prize for poetry. Obviously, “the volume, of which this was the title poem,” was not given to him for onward transmission to Alfred Knopf until later. Furthermore, the claim that he had not written “a line” of his Nigger Heaven by August 1925 is misleading, for in a letter dated March 26, 1925, Langston Hughes hoped “‘Nigger Heaven’ 's successfully finished. It is, isn't it?”

Langston Hughes's rejoinder was stronger. Allison Davis, writing after Van Vechten's denial of Benjamin Brawley's charge, had argued that if the author of Nigger Heaven did not influence The Weary Blues, he “undoubtedly did influence” Fine Clothes to the Jew, Hughes's second volume of poems, which was dedicated to Carl Van Vechten. In his letter to the editor of The Crisis Langston Hughes offered “a correction” based on verifiable facts. He had written many of the poems in both The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew before November 10, 1924, when he met Van Vechten for the first time:

I would like herewith to state and declare that many of the poems in said book were written before I made the acquaintance of Mr. Van Vechten, as the files of THE CRISIS will prove; before the appearance of The Weary Blues containing his preface; and before ever he had commented in any way on my work. (See THE CRISIS for June, 1922, August, 1923, several issues in 1925; also Buccaneer for May, 1925.) Those poems which were written after my acquaintance with Mr. Van Vechten were certainly not about him, not requested by him, not misdirected by him, some of them not liked by him nor so far as I know, do they in any way bear his poetic influence.

He returned to the matter in 1940 and explained that most of the poems that supposedly revealed Carl Van Vechten's influence on Fine Clothes to the Jew were not included in the earlier volume “because scarcely any dialect or folk-poems were included in the Weary Blues.” While what Hughes means by “folk-poems” is not clear, the emphasis in his statement is on the modifier “scarcely,” because The Weary Blues does contain folk poems.

In any event, Langston Hughes could not have owed his interest in the blues and jazz to Carl Van Vechten. His pre-August 1925 correspondence with Van Vechten confirms the latter's claim with regard to the possibility of Hughes's having influenced his concept of the blues although they had different tastes. Hughes's interest in the blues could be traced to the time when, at the age of nine, he heard the blues on Independence Avenue and on Twelfth Street In Kansas City. With regard to jazz, he wrote one of his best jazz poems, “When Sue Wears Red,” at the age of seventeen. He met Carl Van Vechten at the age of twenty-two.

A careful study of his development as a writer shows that the credit for influence has often been misdirected. The three persons who most deserve it are frequently forgotten: (1) Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose dialect poems he liked and tried to imitate as a child; (2) Ethel Weimer, his English teacher at Central High School in Cleveland, who introduced him to the writings of Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters; (3) Carl Sandburg, whose influence on his budding poetic temperament is evident in the form and content of some of his juvenilia and who, obviously, helped to start him on the road which eventually led him to the stark realism—both in subject and style—that shocked some of his critics. Hughes described Sandburg as his “guiding star” in 1940; he had as a boy written a poem about him.

Vachel Lindsay only helped to enlarge his audience since Hughes had already been published by The Crisis before he met and showed Lindsay his “Jazzonia,” “Negro Dancers,” and “The Weary Blues” at the Wardman Park Hotel in December 1925. As a matter of fact, the three poems had already been published in magazines before Lindsay saw them: “Jazzonia” in The Crisis, August 1923; “Negro Dancers” in The Crisis, March 1925; “The Weary Blues” in Opportunity, May 1925, after winning a prize. In any case, Hughes's work does not reveal as much influence of Vachel Lindsay as Countee Cullen's use of the African motif does, for instance.

Still more conspicuous is the absence of the influence of Hughes's famous patron on his work. Incidentally, Langston Hughes was introduced to her only in 1928. At that time he had already published his first two volumes of poetry. He started work on his first novel, Not without Laughter, in the summer of that year. Although the grant he received from her enabled him to complete and revise the novel, any influence she must have had on its form or content is not apparent. The relationship came to an end in December 1930 because Hughes could not satisfy her wish that he “be primitive and know and feel the intuitions of the primitive.”

Carl Van Vechten's interest in his writing must have been pleasing and encouraging to the young author. Given, however, Langston Hughes's strong sense of independence of opinion and of action, both as a child and as an adult, it is fairly reasonable to assume that his choice of subject and of manner of treatment could have been exactly as he had worked them out (before his acquaintance with Van Vechten) with or without the interest and encouragement of the author of Nigger Heaven or anyone else.

He was predisposed to identification with the common man—the black masses or, to use a more recent phrase, “the soul people.” He was one of them. He looked through their eyes and felt through their senses. His art, therefore, was black self-expression.