SOURCE: Chinitz, David. “Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes.” Callaloo 19, no. 1 (winter 1996): 177-92.

In the following essay, Chinitz credits Hughes with having invented blues poetry.

While the adaptation of oral culture to literary ends is never uncomplicated, the accommodation of blues to poetry presents particular difficulties. “Blues,” writes folk musicologist Paul Oliver, “is for singing. It is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down” (8). A poet who wants to write blues can avoid this trap by poeticizing the form—but this is only to fall into another trap, for blues made literary read not like refined folk song but like bad poetry. For Oliver, there is no safe passage between this Scylla and Charybdis: the poetry of the blues eludes the self-conscious imitator inevitably (9-14). We need not concur with the absoluteness of this judgment to appreciate its...