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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What time does the speaker mention going down to the river in "Reverie on the Harlem River"?

2. What are the waves cutting the darkness with in "Moonlight Night: Carmel"?

3. Where is the dream a cocktail at in "Havana Dreams"?

4. What kind of pain does the woman feel in "Strange Hurt"?

5. Where does the playboy mentioned in "Gone Boy" NOT go at the end of the poem?

Short Essay Questions

1. What do many of the poems in the "Afro-American Fragment" section of "Selected Poems of Langston Hughes" have an undercurrent of?

2. What is a Black Maria?

3. What is the unspoken implication about Monroe in "Monroe's Blues"?

4. What exactly is "jazz style" poetry?

5. What simile is used in "Lover's Return"?

6. How does the speaker describe a dream in "Beale Street"?

7. What theme unites the poems in "Distance Nowhere"?

8. What exactly is the Black Pierrot mentioned in the poem of the same name?

9. Why does the speaker want people to wear red in "Wake"?

10. Why is the speaker so surprised by his girlfriend's snoring in "Morning After"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss 3 rhetorical devices Hughes uses to transform the historical person Billie Holiday to the literary person in the poem of the same name.

Essay Topic 2

Discuss how the poem "Early Evening Quarrel" can be analyzed as a vignette that addresses the larger themes (particularly those of romance and the dynamics between men and women) present in "Selected Poems of Langston Hughes."

Essay Topic 3

Discuss why Hughes decided to name the section of "Selected Poems of Langston Hughes" that deals with the American South "Magnolia Flowers." Make sure to address the symbolism and imagery of a magnolia that Hughes taps into.

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This section contains 677 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample