SOURCE: "Langston Hughes and Approaches to Modernism in the Harlem Renaissance," in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, Garland Publishing, 1989, pp. 49-72.

In the following essay, Rampersad argues that Hughes's use of the blues form in his poetry places him in the modernist tradition.

In 1936, certainly after the end of the Harlem Renaissance, one highly literate young black student, a junior at Tuskegee Institute, saw no connection between modernism and black American verse even as he recognized a link between modernism and black culture. "Somehow in my uninstructed reading of Pound and Eliot," he later wrote, "I had recognized a relationship between modern poetry and jazz music, and this led me to wonder why I was not encountering similar devices in the work of Afro-American writers." In 1936, however, the youth came across a poem by a young black Communist based in Chicago, published in New Masses. Although the poem "was...