Langston Hughes's Poems

Vagabonds

by Langston Hughes

We are the desperate
Who do not care,
The hungry
Who have nowhere
To eat,
No place to sleep,
The tearless
Who cannot
Weep.

The text shows us about his suffers from poverty and all happening things that came from living in a stratified community. Beside stratified community, Hughes also learned to endure his prejudice being afro-American without surrendering his dignity.

Share-Croppers

by Langston Hughes

Just a herd of Negroes
Driven to the field,
Plowing, planting, hoeing,
To make the cotton yield.

When the cotton's picked
And the work is done
Boss man takes the money
And we get none,

Leaves us hungry, ragged
As we were before.
Year by year goes by
And we are nothing more

Than a herd of Negroes
Driven to the field--
Plowing life away
To make the cotton yield.

He also had already socialism and he believes that socialism as a solution to capitalism. He wrote:

“If You Would”
You could stop the
factory whistle blowing,
Stop the mine machinery
from going,
Stop the atom bombs
exploding,
Stop the battleships
from loading,
Stop the merchant
ships from sailing,
Stop the jail house keys
from turning
...You could
If you would

His outstanding work is also tells working-class content. Because he grew up in working class family in Jim Crow USA, no wonder if he always wrote about life and culture of the African American people in working-class system. His writing was inspired by and dedicated to the African American people in working class as a whole but his main focus was on Black worker.

In the Soviet Union, which he visited in the 1930s, he wrote, “The daily papers picture the Bolsheviks as the greatest devils on earth, but I couldn’t see how they could be so bad if they had done away with race hatred and landlords – two evils that I knew first hand.” (Author: George Fishman
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 03/30/02 00:00 )

Annisa Mayang Putri (0608231)
English Literature B 2006