Langston Hughes’s Literary Revolution: Deliberate Choice of Jazz, Gospel and Black Poetry

The present work intends to bring evidence to the point that LangstonHughes is a revolutionary. As a matter of fact, like his contemporaries ofthe Harlem Renaissance Movement and later on the writers and poets ofNegritude, he wrote poems that can be termed unconventional. They are socalled because they did not respect any prevailing aesthetic rules governingpoetry in their epoch. These poems are of three categories. Jazz poetry,here Hughes patterned his poems after the rhythm of Jazz music. Thisrhythm was very popular among the Blacks in Harlem. Gospel is anothernew type of poetry created by Hughes. Here the poems are patterned afterGospel music which is also popular with black churches in the Southespecially during the slavery time. The last category of new poetry thatHughes brought to the world of theater was Black poetry, that is, poetrythat was concerned with the black people’s experience in the U.S.A. Poemsfrom all these three categories are analyzed in the paper.