Langston Hughes

Inspiration From Life

Langston Hughes had many influences in his life that is reflected in his work. Every author has a “muse” for hisher writings because heshe is inspired differently by a number of things. Influence and inspiration are relatively the same, they both affect a person. How that person is affected is the way heshe perceives and feels about it. Hughes was influenced by several things. One of which was a famous poet named Walt Whitman. Other things that influenced Hughes were racism, music, and ironically his own depression.

Langston Hughes was particularly inspired by Walt Whitman so much so that he took Whitman’s book, Leaves of Grass, with him when he traveled to Africa in the early 1920s , and edited a collection of Whitman's work in 1946. Hughes was first introduced to Walt Whitman’s work in his 8th grade English class. In Hughes’ junior year, he published his first poem in free verse, one that showed the clear influence of Walt Whitman for the first time (Bloom, 90). Hughes praised how Whitman's "...all embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers, Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs and free men, beaming democracy to all."(Hughes, 128) Like Whitman, Hughes wanted to be a writer without becoming- in Whitman’s term- a “literatus”. Like Whitman, Hughes wanted to share the common man’s experiences, for he wanted to be a spokesman for the common man (Berry, 32). Hughes wrote a letter once to his close friend Walter White, an NAACP official, more well-known as the executive secretary of the NAACP. In the letter Hughes writes, “I’ve been invited to read my poems at Walt Whitman’s House in Camden on March 1st. The invitation came from the Walt Whitman Foundation, and because I admire his work so much it seems a great honor for me to read my humble poems in the house where he lived and worked…..” (Berry, 86) Langston Hughes showed that Walt Whitman influenced him in his work by the way Hughes praised Whitman.

Racism was a commonly known influence for the Negro authors in Hughes’ day. What made Hughes’ distinction as a poet was the highly original manner in which he internalized the Afro-American racial dilemma and expressed it in poems such as “When Sue Wears Red”, “Mother to Son”, “Dream Variations”, “The Weary Blues”, and his most famous poem “The Negro Speaks Of Rivers” (Bloom 96-97). Written when Hughes was only seventeen as he traveled by train across the Mississippi, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a beautiful statement of strength in the history of black people. In this poem Hughes imagines stretching his mind as far back as ancient Egypt and further into Africa and the cradle of civilization. The poem returns at the end to America in a moment of optimistic alchemy when he sees the “muddy bosom“ of the Mississippi “turn all golden in the sunset“. Hughes wrote about the composing of “The Negro Speaks Of Rivers” in his autobiography The Big Sea.

All day on the train I had been thinking of my father. Now it was just the sunset and we crossed the Mississippi, slowly, over a long bridge. I looked out of the window of the Pullman at the great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South , and I began to think what that river, the Old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in the past- how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave in bondage. Then I remembered reading how Abraham Lincoln had made a trip down the Mississippi on a raft, and how he had seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from American life. Then I began to think of other rivers in our past- the Congo, the Niger, and the Nile of Africa- and the thought came to me: ‘I’ve known river”, and I put it down on the back of an envelope I had in my pocket, and within the space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the train gathered speed in the dusk, I had written this poem (The Big Sea, 54).

Most of Hughes’ literature was written to publicly oppose racism. Therefore racism was an influence in his life and work.

Most of Hughes’ output reflected his interest in Harlem specifically and Negro Urban life generally. “Cabaret”, “Jazzonia”,