SOURCE: Patterson, Anita. “Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes.” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2000): 651-82.

In the following essay, Patterson examines the jazz poetics and the modernistic aspects of Hughes's verse.

In 1940 Richard Wright, praising Langston Hughes's contribution to the development of modern American literature, observed that Hughes's “realistic position” had become the “dominant outlook of all those Negro writers who have something to say.”¹ Nineteen years later James Baldwin faulted Hughes for failing to follow through consistently on the artistic premises laid out in his early verse. The problem with his unsuccessful poems, Baldwin said, was that they “take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of experience.” In succumbing to the idiomatic demands of a sociological perspective—the pressure, that is, to “hold the experience outside him”—they did not fulfill an essential criterion...