The Role Of Jazz Music In Langston Hughes' Poetry

As a poet, autobiographer, novelist, playwright, essayist, folklorist, translator and writer of children's books, Langston Hughes was the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance. During his literary career he published more than three dozen books. With his starting point The Weary Blues (1926) and his final volume of verse which was published posthumously, The Panther and the Lash (1967), Hughes published sixteen books of poetry during his lifetime, winning him unofficial yet well-deserved titles as "Shakespeare in Harlem" and "the poet laureate of the Negro". His utilization of African-American folk art in his primary genre, poetry, established him as one of the most original poets of the twentieth century. Committed to African-American vernacular culture, Hughes employed black music into his writing. Owing to his creative experiment of jazz music in his jazz poems, he was also acknowledged as a pioneer of jazz poetry. Most of his works remained loyal to the principles that he had laid down in 1926 for young black writers:write with race pride to reveal the attitudes, experiences, and language of everyday black Americans while enjoying the freedom as an artist.Hughes'jazz poems have attracted many scholars and much academic research has been done to unveil the charm of his jazz poetry. Many researchers have tried to discover the motivations of his jazz poems and have reached various conclusions. In China, however, the study of Langston Hughes is still at a starting stage. There are a small number of academic writings about him, but most confine to his most well-known works. Jazz poetry, however, is so far a seldom mentioned concept. Both domestic and foreign studies on Hughes leave plenty of room for further research. Among the possibilities a basic question that still remains unanswered is what functions jazz has in Langston Hughes'poetry. Since there are positive and negative comments on the issue, it is worthwhile to look into the question and gain a possible answer.This paper holds that jazz music helps Hughes in his jazz poems to express his social ideals:to arouse African Americans'racial awareness, to elevate black social status, so as to achieve his people's improvement and finally attain racial freedom and justice. In order to explain this, the relationship between jazz and jazz poetry is firstly analyzed. The paper then falls into five aspects to examine the functions of the music in his jazz poetry:jazz as an enhancer of poetic rhythm, jazz as a true-to-life diversity of expressions, jazz as a time tag of the poetic lines, jazz as a strong weapon and loud voice calling for freedom and justice, and jazz as a successful model of anti-marginalization.Discussion in the paper relies mainly on textual analysis. In order to confine the paper to a reasonable length many poems are not fully quoted. The paper goes to a detailed explanation of jazz elements, and examines jazz music's functions in Langston Hughes's jazz poems from a cultural perspective. The paper also analyzes the influence of jazz development on the social value of Hughes' jazz poetry from a new perspective, which, according to the covered resources and materials, may cast new light on future Hughes studies.