Hughes's creative genius was influenced by his life in New York City's Harlem, a primarily African American neighborhood. His literary works helped shape American literature and politics. Hughes, like others active in the Harlem Renaissance, had a strong sense of racial pride.
Here Hughes writes with the force of a good journalist; he is no longer an abstract Negro everyman but a reporter weighing in on the heat and confusion of the time, without too much self-conscious hipster jive.
It was during the heady days of the civil-rights movement. By Hilton Als. I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. He did a lazy sway. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Detectives from the vice squad with weary sadistic eyes spotting fairies. Degenerates , some folks say. But God, Nature, or somebody made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian over there? I loved my friend. He went away from me. There is nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began— I loved my friend. Nobody loves a genius child. Can you love an eagle, Tame or wild? Can you love an eagle, Wild or tame? Can you love a monster Of frightening name? A place that would not be bestowed or handed down, but rightfully acknowledged of a people who made the American dream their own, through their resistance and endurance, but most importantly by their work, including the work of the poet.
The poem is an argument for the creative power of culture in articulating the rights of citizenship. Hughes, like Whitman, is now accepted into the American canon not without debate or controversy. Hughes, like Whitman, was a poet of the vernacular. Writing in the early 20th century, Hughes avoided an intellectualized modernism or a distanced formalism for verse that was steeped in the lives of ordinary men and women.
Hughes directly articulated the emotional lives of post-Emancipation African Americans. The blues were crucial here, not only in giving Hughes a subject but a voice. He was also one of the first artists to write jazz poetry. Here he is integrating jazz and blues rhythms, subjects, themes into poetry. Throughout his career, Hughes wrote 16 collections of poetry, 12 novels and short story collections, 11 major plays, eight books for children, seven works of non-fiction, and numerous essays.
And his career of course, spanned decades. His career ended when he died in And in this Hughes articulates for the first time a kind of racial consciousness and cultural nationalism.
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