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Few doubt the significance of Langston Hughes' presence in 20th-century American literature. But how is this presence accounted for in criticism of his poetry? The Harlem Renaissance novelist, Jessie Fauset, authored one of the earliest reviews of Hughes' debut collection, The Weary Blues (1926). In the Crisis magazine, Fauset praises Hughes' blues-based and jazz-influenced poems for significantly addressing "universal subject[s] served Negro-style," adding that "while I am no great lover of any dialect I hope heartily that Mr. Hughes will give us many more" of comparable poems (Contemporary Reviews 61). Fauset's ambivalence concerning Hughes' use of dialect may seem ironic, considering that many succeeding critics praised his faithful representations of Black vernacular speech as one of his writing's hallmark features. Yet her emphasis on Hughes' race and its implicit relationship to his poems' representative content and style reflects the nature of much subsequent Hughes criticism. For example, Walter Farrell and Patricia A. Johnson remark that Hughes' book-length poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred, served as "Hughes' poetic commentary on the unrest and anxiety of post-war Black America" ("Poetic" 60), while the scholar John Lowney views Hughes as not only a commenting spectator but also a prophetic participant in the "expression of collective black anger" present in Montage (364). In a more recent essay, the scholar Erskine Peters asserts that "Hughes uses black music" in his poetry "as aesthetic, social and political referent because, to a great extent, black music is black history" (34, italics mine). As these brief examples suggest, scholarship on Hughes' writing has historically correlated Hughes' aesthetic and poetic concerns with his racial identity.'
I begin this essay by highlighting the traditional presentation of Hughes as a racially representative writer. My initial focus is on Hughes' status as a racial placeholder, as a totemic figure whose pedestal is primarily built on his "authentic" rendering of African-American forms of vernacular and musical expression. First I will show how the current critical figuration of Hughes' work fosters a limited representation of his poetic aesthetic, particularly his jazz-influenced verse. Next, I examine two key aspects of Hughes' poetry that have received insufficient scholarly attention: a) his later volumes of jazz-influenced poetry, the aforementioned Montage (1951) and Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), and b)...