Unlimited all-in-one ebooks in one place.
Free trial account for registered user.

eBook includes PDF, ePub and Kindle version

A beautiful new edition of this beloved poet's first collection, originally published in 1926 when he was just twenty-four.
From the opening "Proem" (prologue poem) he offers in this first book-"I am a Negro: / Black as night is black, / Black the depths of my Africa"-Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans, at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As his Knopf editor Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 volume, illuminating the potential of this promising young voice, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race...Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal" and, he concludes, they are "the expression [of] an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, sometimes with shocking confidence and clarity: "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies / That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers/ Of the world."

• Langston Hughes
• Published 1970 January 1st by Alfred A. Knopf; 10th Printing edition (1945) (first published 1970 January 1st)
• ISBN:
• ISBN13:
• 128 Pages
• 4.43 3308 ratings
• 451 reviews