| This thesis is a study of the relationship between poetry and jazz music from the 1900s to the present. It attempts to discover how the two art forms intertwined in America's popular culture while subverting the popular culture with covert social commentary. By examining the development of jazz music from its roots in blues, to swing, bebop, free jazz and finally into hip hop, in relation to the work of the poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, this thesis finds a correlation between the arts in their use of invention, revision and reinterpretation. The thesis concludes that jazz poetry illuminates jazz's implied social critique through written text. |
