SOURCE: "What Can a Poet Do? Langston Hughes and M. B. Tolson," in New Letters, Vol. 48, No. 1, Fall, 1981, pp. 19-29.

In the following essay, Farnsworth traces Tolson's relationship with fellow poet Langston Hughes.

The academic year 1931–1932 was in retrospect probably the most crucial year of Melvin B. Tolson's writing career. He was thirty-four years old. He had a wife and four children. He had been teaching in the English Department of Wiley College since 1923. And he had been writing poetry and fiction at least since the age of fourteen when he published a poem about the wreck of the Titanic in a local newspaper in Oskaloosa, Iowa. The poetry and fiction which can be gleaned from Tolson's high school and college publications and a later story which appeared in a Wiley College yearbook all lend credence to the self-evaluation Tolson wrote late in the 1930's: "In 1932 I was...