Politics in Poetics: A Critical Reading of Langston Hughes’s Poems

Abstract

The research entitled “Politics in Poetics: A Critical Reading of Langston Hughes’s Poems” explores the political dimension of Hughes’s poems in the light of the Negro Art and the New Historicism. His poems are impregnated with a conscious of revolution, revolt and resistance for a meaningful change and transformation of the society. Like a political slogan, his poems function to awake a consciousness of revolution in the minds of the Black and working class people to fight against the racist and the capitalist world order. They strive for a world that is free of racial and class discrimination. Therefore, Hughes has employed poetry as a dynamic location for staging rebellion against the most repressive features of racism and the most suppressive features of capitalism. However, his rebellion carries a deep political vision, that is, to achieve an equal socio-political rights for every citizen, and thus, to create a world of freedom, liberty, justice and equality.