A Study On The Musicality Of Langston Hughes’ Poetry

Langston Hughes is one of the outstanding poets of the Harlem Renaissance Movement.In terms of the relationship between poetry and music,Hughes made efforts to explore the musicality of poetry,which is further more significant,compared with the studies on the forms of music and poetry.Based on the analysis of Hughes’ poetries,this thesis focuses on the musicality of Langston Hughes’ poetries in terms of rhythm,image,and the relationship between poetry and music.It discusses the general significance of the study of musicality in studies in poetry.The thesis is divided into three parts.The first chapter mainly analyzes the rhythms in Hughes’ poetries which can be summarized with “Impromptu Riffs” and“Pause Variation” and the musical performance of Hughes’ s poetries in terms of the rhythms through exploring Hughes’ s aesthetic treatments on poetries.Hughes aimed to show the musical changes in poetries like Jazz via “Impromptu Riffs” and “Pause Variation” and made more musicality emerged.The second chapter discusses the musical image in Hughes’ poetries and summarizes the music image categories in his poetry with the subject-object image and the pure music image to illustrate the representation of musicality in poetic image.This chapter explores the specific expression of musicality in Hughes’ poetries from the perspective of image analysis.The subject-object music image means the common player image and instrument image in Hughes’ poetries and the pure music image refers to the auditory symbolic onomatopoeia image.In addition,this chapter also discusses the possible reasons behind Hughes’ choice of musical imagery,analyzes the influence of Black Music represented by blues on Hughes’ creation and expounds the generation of musicality in the interaction between music and literature.The third chapter mainly focuses on the significance of Hughes’ musicality,and emphasizes on the role of musicality in the form and content of his poetries.Specifically,the musicality issues guide the poetsto pay attention to the external forms such as the poetry construction and rhythms in order to help poetry to realize the intercommunication of art forms,enrich the connotation of poetry,and provide with the reference of musical expression to poetry.In addition,this chapter also reconsiders the relationship between poetry and music in Hughes’ poetries,explores the two characteristics of poetries’ musicality,namely,the ability to sing in music and the translatability of poetry,and reaffirms the role of the study on the musicality of Langston Hughes’ poetry in the development of poetry.