SOURCE: Ikonne, Chidi. “Affirmation of Black Self.” In Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 151-67. New York, N.Y.: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989.

The following essay, which appeared in Ikonne's From DuBois to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature 1903-1926 (1981), focuses on the aspect of self-expression and race identification in the works of Langston Hughes.

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...