Critical Overview
- Sociological and Historical Criticism:
- Hughes's work emphasized the African-American oral tradition stylistically and social engagement
thematically, so it comes as no surprise that the preponderance of critical
attention to his writing has tended to focus on the sociological and historical
approaches. But as valid as these are as avenues of access to his work, there
are those who find them ultimately insufficient to encompass the magnitude of
his achievement. Onwuchekwa Jemie maintains in Langston Hughes: An
Introduction to the Poetry (1976): "Hughes's social and philosophical
universe is no more circumscribed or parochial than the universes of Aeschylus,
Aristophanes, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman,
Dostoevsky, Hopkins, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Gide, or Sartre. His philosophical
system, the hidden infrastructure of ideas and procedures over and around and
onto which his art is molded, is as firm, complete, autonomous, and valid as
theirs."
- Formalist, Psychological, and Reader-Response Criticism:
- Some formal critics have felt that Hughes's poems are too straightforward. Jemie
responds: "A well-worded rebuke to the excessive devotion to formal complexity,
which characterizes the modern sensibility and which is largely responsible for
the low esteem of Hughes's poetry among the critics, is now and always in
order. Regardless what the elitist, antidemocratic, modernist schoolmen think
and teach, poetic value is not commensurate with difficulty of comprehension,
nor with erudition exhibited in masses of esoterica and obscure allusions, nor
with the paucity of the audience to whom a poet chooses to address his work."
Jemie's observations should provide a useful platform from which to consider
Hughes's work through the approaches of formalist, psychological, and reader-response criticism.
Additional Resources: The eighth edition of Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama includes in-depth critical analysis of Hughes's fiction by Arnold Rampersad, Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson, Darryl Pinckney, Peter Townsend, and Onwuchekwa Jemie. Please refer to your textbook.
The Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about Langston Hughes. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Hughes Links.
