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And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed.
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
-Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues
When we analyze and weigh the most innovative voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes-alongside Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Helene Johnson-remains at the axis. Where Countee Cullen and Claude McKay embraced the archaism of the Keatian ode and the Elizabethan sonnet,' respectively, Hughes grafted on to his modernist vision traditional blues as well as the Chicago Renaissance (Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg).2 So, as the other voices grew silent during the Great Depression of 1929-with modernism3 and imagism4 having taken a firm hold and reshaped the tongue and heart of American poetry-the 1930s found a prolific Hughes. From the outset an American-ness had been at the center of Hughes's work, which is one of the reasons he has endured. Even his benchmark poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" plumbs the "muddy bosom" of the Mississippi after its narrator praises the Euphrates and the Congo (i.e., after taking readers on a tour through African heritage, the poem focuses on racial tensions in America).
Like Walt Whitman, the pulse and throb of Hughes's vision is driven by an acute sense of beauty and tragedy in America's history. Arnold Rampersad says in The Life of Langston Hughes that "On a visit to Kansas City he became aware of yet another aspect of black culture on which he would draw later as an artist and an individual. At an open air theatre on Independence Avenue, from an orchestra of blind musicians, Hughes first heard the blues. The music seemed to cry, but the words somehow laughed." Where Whitman had embraced the aria of the Italian opera (horizontal music), Hughes's divining rod quivered over the bedrock of the blues (vertical music).' The short lines of the blues poems create a syncopated insistence and urgency. Art has to have tension. And it is the simultaneous laughter and crying that create the tension in Hughes's blues poetry.6 Hughes writes in "Homesick Blues":
"Homesick blues is / A terrible thing to have. / To keep from cryin' / I opens ma mouth...