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    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B"
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B"
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B"
    Ebook37 pages26 minutes

    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535840781
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B" - Gale

      1

      Theme for English B

      Langston Hughes

      1951

      Introduction

      Theme for English B appeared in print relatively late in Langston Hughes’s career, and it both reenacts and complicates the ideas and poetic rhythms with which he had always been concerned. Published in 1951 in Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes’s thirteenth book of poetry, Theme for English B contributes to the book’s collection of African-American voices living in Harlem by questioning whether any voice—and any of our American voices in particular—can exist in isolation, distinct from those surrounding it. Stylistically, the piece is a dramatic monologue (in the voice of an African-American student at Columbia University, where Hughes himself spent a dissatisfying period during the early 1920s), and it utilizes the superficially simplistic rhymes for which Hughes had become famous. How he uses these techniques in this poem, however, differs somewhat from the way he winds the jazzy tunes of his first collection, The Weary Blues (1926), a book the established Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen claimed could not be "dismissed as merely promising. Rather than use his poetic form to consolidate a distinctive sense of African-American identity, in Theme for English B" Hughes flips and spins his rhymes in order to leave his reader wondering what actually distinguishes and divides the young black student in the poem from his socially established white professor.

      Langston Hughes came to artistic prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, an explosive period of innovative creative expression in the New York African-American community in the early-twentieth century. In his poetry, plays, and fiction, Hughes attempted to blend a variety of forms of African-American cultural expression, and in his poetry, in particular, Hughes pioneered the rein-scription of jazz and blues tunes in written verse, paving the way for future writers to incorporate their own spoken folk vernacular in their own poems. While his contemporary critics often dismissed his work as simplistic or naive, Hughes’s position as one of the twentieth-century’s most important American poets is now openly recognized and celebrated.

      Author Biography

      Langston Hughes’s writing career stretched from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. The most prolific African-American writer of his

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