Poetry
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes · 1926
Opening lines
I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Sixty-nine poems: a short opening poem, “I Am a Negro”, then seven sections. The first follows a Black pianist who plays late into the night on Lenox Avenue and quotes the verse he sings in blues form: a line, its repetition, then the answer. Then come cabarets and dancers, songs for a Black Pierrot, poems of harbour and sea, the portrait of a Mexican market woman and that of a Cuban woman, and a poem in which an “I” who speaks for his race says he has known the rivers, from the Euphrates to the Mississippi.
Context
In December 1925, the author is a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, where Vachel Lindsay is to read his verse in a room closed to Black people; he copies out three of his poems and places them beside the poet's plate. The press announces the very next day the discovery of a busboy poet. But the book was already under contract with Knopf: the encounter earned him his reputation, not his publication. The volume appeared in 1926 with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten and a cover by Miguel Covarrubias.
Who it is for
Short poems; some follow the rhythms of blues and jazz, the rest belong to a more classical lyricism. Translated into French by Julien Tribotté in 2026.
Prizes and reception
Mixed reception in 1926: Jessie Fauset praised it in The Crisis, Countee Cullen expressed reservations about the jazz poems. The book made its author one of the names of the movement.
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