This essay discusses the uses of theme and language (Hughes poem "A Dream Deferred," as well as the imagery and connotation or the words he chooses.

Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) is more carefully orchestrated than Hughes's earlier volumes because conceived as a unity, as one continuous poem, although it is organized in sections and subtitles just like the others, and uses single poems previously published in periodicals. In Montage the days of our black lives are telescoped into one day and one night. Montage is primarily a technique of the motion picture, its camera eye sweeping swiftly from scene to scene, juxtaposing disparate scenes in rapid succession or superimposing one scene (layer of film) over another until the last fades into the next. In literature, montage provides a technical shortcut, a means of avoiding the sometimes long-winded "logical" transitions demanded by the conventional story line. Through...