Let America Be America Again Summary Review
Langston Hughes signs autographs following a lecture at Howard University in 1957 (Washington Area Spark/Flickr)
Post-obit Donald Trump's election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in law custody, the verse form has constitute new urgency. Maybe it was the word once again that starting time drew people's attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 campaign slogan to "Make America Cracking Again," Hughes published a poem called "Let America Be America Again."
Sometimes referred to as the "poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. After living in United mexican states for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921 to study engineering at Columbia University. Drawn to the literary life, he joined other voices at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. Hughes's get-go poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in 1921, addressed the Blackness experience in America: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
Hughes left Columbia and traveled to the due west declension of Africa, Rotterdam, Paris, and northern Italia, returning to the United States in 1924. In 1926, he published his outset book of poems, The Weary Blues. Influenced by poets such every bit Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hughes embraced free verse. His collection included the poem "I, Too," which opens "I, too, sing America," and closes "I, too, am America." ("I hear America singing," his spiritual mentor Whitman had written.)
In 1929, Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, the nation'southward get-go degree-granting historically Black college. He continued to travel widely and, through the 1930s, wrote poems, plays, short stories, and a novel. He was sympathetic to radical causes, and his work across the decade displayed a socialist rhetoric common to the era. But he never joined the Communist Political party, as many of his friends may have.
Hughes published "Let America Exist America Once more" in an abbreviated version in 1936 and in its final form two years afterwards in A New Song, a collection issued by the International Workers Order. The work addresses the pregnant of America and offers both a critique and an affirmation of the American ideal.
Lamenting the conditions of the Low, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the complimentary."
It begins "Let America be America again / Permit it be the dream it used to be," then continues, "Let America exist the dream the dreamers dreamed." Information technology'south a dream of freedom, equality, opportunity, and liberty—the ideals that grade the bedrock of the nation. Yet a parenthetic voice adds, "(America never was America to me)."
If you know Hughes's piece of work, it is tempting to read the parenthetic "me" as a victim of the long history of racial segregation and oppression. The poem anticipates this assumption, and a new voice asks, "Say, who are y'all that mumbles in the nighttime?" What follows is a list of everyday Americans: "the poor white," "the Negro," "the red human being," "the immigrant," "the farmer," "the worker." All are carrying hope for a better time to come, and all have fallen victim to "the same sometime stupid plan / Of canis familiaris consume dog, of mighty crush the weak." America is not America to whatever of them.
Given Hughes's radical sympathies, the class analysis is non surprising. The poem laments the weather condition of the Depression, with millions unemployed and on relief, and asks what happened to America, the purported "homeland of the free," where and then many take naught left now "except the dream that's almost dead today."
About expressionless, yet unvanquished.
For Hughes, the Usa was an unrealized, possibly unrealizable platonic. It was a country that "never has been still— / And yet must be," a dreamland unlike any other state. But the nation'due south failure time and over again to live up to its aspirations is a profound role of the story. Whatever its struggles, the United States has always identified itself by its dreams. Dreams inspired by abstractions similar democracy, justice, and rights. Dreams blithe past those seeking freedom and equality. Dreams stirred by those making a new dwelling in America and pursuing a better life. Hughes believed in those dreams, and his poem ends non with despair, only with an urgent plea:
We, the people, must redeem
The country, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these slap-up dark-green states—
And make America once again!
Hughes would continue to think almost America, asking, "What happens to a dream deferred?" in a 1951 poem titled "Harlem." Martin Luther King Jr. had also been contemplating dreams, long earlier his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. King and Hughes were friends: in 1956, King recited a Hughes verse form, "Female parent to Son," from the pulpit. Because of the poet's suspected Communist sympathies (Hughes had testified before Joseph McCarthy'southward Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), however, Rex publicly kept his distance. Nonetheless, in 1967, seven months after Hughes died, he declared that although "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes … I still have a dream."
King must accept appreciated the closing of "Let America Be America Again," where the people are summoned to redeem the land. In a sermon outset delivered in 1954, he alleged that "instead of making history, we are made by history."
The line is easily misunderstood. King was not offering an argument for why history matters; rather, he was decrying passivity and insisting on empowerment. It was a call to action. The preacher was telling his congregation that the time for waiting on dreams was over—the fourth dimension for making dreams come true had begun.
Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/let-america-be-america-again/
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