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Trumpet Player Summary
This poem evocatively describes the black trumpet player whose music emerges from his soul and is an index of past sufferings and old desires.
Trumpet Player Analysis
We have touched already on Hughes' complicated relationship to the faddish primitivism that dominated artistic circles in the 1920s and 1930s. While Hughes was drawn to primitivism for its exaltation of the simple beauty he admired in his own people as well as for its emphasis on a time before slavery—the irrecoverable African experience of the American slave—he was also repulsed by the primitivism which would reduce the black experience to the picturesque. One can see, in particular, the sophistication of Hughes' understanding of black culture as compared with the primitivist understanding in those poems which take jazz or the jazz musician as their subject. The primitivists as well as...
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This section contains 282 words (approx. 1 page at 400 words per page) |
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