Dream Variations Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 30 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Dream Variations.
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Dream Variations Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 30 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Dream Variations.
This section contains 1,239 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Dream Variations Study Guide

The Spiritual Reunion with Africa

Although nowhere in "Dream Variations" does the speaker say where his dream takes place, it has been suggested by many critics that the "place of the sun" to which he refers is Africa. Langston Hughes wrote the poem in 1924, a time when the Back to Africa movement was gaining strength, when African art was being introduced to Europe and America, and when many African Americans were searching for a place and values that were distinctly their own and not part of white American culture. Hughes had traveled to West Africa in 1923, and in many of his early poems, he uses Africa to represent an ideal, a place of warmth and freedom that is a foil to the cold, uncaring atmosphere of the United States where for blacks discrimination, racism, and often brutal treatment were a feature of everyday life.

In the first stanza of...

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This section contains 1,239 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Dream Variations Study Guide
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Dream Variations from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.