essay draft

To really grasp this poem one must look at the poem itself first. The wording in this poem helps support the subject that this poem isn’t just Hughes telling people not to give up, but more importantly, a plea to an entire race to not give up when someone keeps you down. The wording in this poem reflects very negative and disgusting things. In most of the poem words such as “fester”, or “stink” come up quite often. Hughes chooses such words to reflect and describe a situation that he was put in along with many others during his life. Hughes uses the worst descriptions and words possible in this poem because he wants the reader to feel downtrodden and disgusted, but still able to come through and work towards their goal. One line that really stresses this emotion is near the end of the poem, “Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load (Booth, pp. 9-10). This line drives it all home for what the writer is trying to get across. Hughes uses the phrases “sags” and “heavy load” to try and further bring the reader down and put them in a world that tries to bring them down as well. It is a warning almost, that says when you try to succeed in this world and try to accomplish your dream, you will face hardships and prejudices before you can accomplish it. But then the question arises, why does Hughes feel this way? Why does he feel that the world he lives in would try and deter a person from gaining success? For that we must look into the timeframe in which Mr. Hughes lived.
Langston Hughes grew up in a time of segregation and prejudice against blacks. He lived in many places that had racism but the one that struck him the most was the city Harlem in New York. In a piece I found online “The Harvest of Race Prejudice” (http://etext.virginia.edu) written by Kelly Miller, she stresses that Harlem was one of the biggest examples of a state driven by segregation. “The Most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States is seen in Harlem. There is no local law prescribing it. There does not have to be” (Miller). This shows that despite being one of the more populated cities in New York, it is a location that has a deep history of prejudice against other races. Hughes made the title of his poem “Harlem” because he has chosen this city as the ultimate testing grounds of one’s true devotion to their goal. If you can make it Harlem then you can make it anywhere, to turn a phrase. Harlem is not mentioned anywhere else in the poem but the reason it is chosen as the title is because the timeframe and the world that was Harlem back in the 1950’s. When you read the poem you are made to think about Harlem and you are put into that location. Hughes thinks of Harlem as a place where your dreams are often differed, but even if this is so, he asks the question, do you let it beat you or do you “explode” (Booth, pp. 11)? Hughes may have become a successful writer but he had to have experienced some difficulties growing up to want to express such frustrations in “Harlem”. To find out such motives behind this poem we must dive into the life of the writer himself.