Langston Hughes

The Weary Blues (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)-"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"-Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race . . . Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal," and, he concludes, they are the expression of "an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is "celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream," and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American "I" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins "I, too, sing America," but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies," the young Hughes offers, "That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world."

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Seitenzahl: 128
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Februar 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780385352987
• Artikelnr.: 42188169

Autorenporträt

LANGSTON HUGHES was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. After graduation from high school, he spent a year in Mexico with his father, then a year studying at Columbia University. His first poem published in a nationally known magazine was "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which appeared in Crisis in 1921. In 1925, he was awarded the First Prize for Poetry from the magazine Opportunity for "The Weary Blues," which gave its title to this, his first book of poems. Hughes received his B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929. In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Litt.D. by his alma mater; during his lifetime, he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1935), a Rosenwald Fellowship (1940), and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant (1947). From 1926 until his death in 1967, Hughes devoted his time to writing and lecturing. He wrote poetry, short stories, autobiography, song lyrics, essays, humor, and plays. A cross section of his work was published in 1958 as The Langston Hughes Reader; a Selected Poems first appeared in 1959 and a Collected Poems in 1994. Today, his many works and his contribution to American letters continue to be cherished and celebrated around the world.

Inhaltsangabe

Introducing Langston Hughes to the Reader
Proem
The Weary Blues
The Weary Blues
Jazzonia
Negro Dancers
The Cat and the Saxophone
Young Singer
Cabaret
To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s
To a Little Lover-Lass, Dead
Harlem Night Club
Nude Young Dancer
Young Prostitute
To a Black Dancer
Song for a Banjo Dance
Blues Fantasy
Lenox Avenue: Midnight
Dream Variations
Dream Variation
Winter Moon
Poème d’Automne
Fantasy in Purple
March Moon
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Cross
The Jester
The South
As I Grew Older
Aunt Sue’s Stories
Poem
Black Pierrot
A Black Pierrot
Harlem Night Song
Songs to the Dark Virgin
Ardella
Poem—To the Black Beloved
When Sue Wears Red
Pierrot
Water-Front Streets
Water-Front Streets
A Farewell
Long Trip
Port Town
Sea Calm
Caribbean Sunset
Young Sailor
Seascape
Natcha
Sea Charm
Death of an Old Seaman
Shadows in the Sun
Beggar Boy
Troubled Woman
Suicide’s Note
Sick Room
Soledad
To the Dark Mercedes
Mexican Market Woman
After Many Springs
Young Bride
The Dream Keeper
Poem (To F.S.)
Our Land
Our Land
Lament for Dark Peoples
Afraid
Poem—For the Portrait of an African Boy
Summer Night
Disillusion
Danse Africaine
The White Ones
Mother to Son
Poem
Epilogue