SOURCE: Dace, Tish. “On Langston Hughes: Pioneering Poet.” The American Poetry Review 24, no. 6 (November-December 1995): 35-8.

In the following essay, Dace offers an enthusiastic review of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.

Briefly, I felt desolate.

For weeks I had thrilled while reading from cover to cover The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, reacquainting myself with old friends and, more joyously, meeting the 226 poems never before included in a Hughes collection. Intoxicated, I had reveled in it hour after hour, reluctant to eat or sleep, irritable when the phone called me away, slack when confronted with other duties. How could any Hughes lover do anything but immerse his or her life in the volume, so full of treasures, old and new, offering many more rewards than even enthusiasts might expect.

Then, however, I had finished the book. And now I'd read them all, I feared, bereft, that never again...