ABSTRACT
In tracing the nearly fifty-year span of Langston Hughes’s eclectic career as poet, novelist, short story writer, social activist, reporter, dramatist, essayist, translator, editor, librettist, folklorist, and newspaper columnist, critics (and even Hughes himself in his autobiographies) tend to emphasize disjunctions or to identify distinct and often contradictory phases of his oeuvre. My focus for this chapter, however, will be on the essential continuities throughout the various stages of Hughes’s career. Other critics have noted important patterns and connections: Raymond Smith locates a continuous attempt “to resolve the dilemma of divided consciousness” throughout Hughes’s poetic works; R. Baxter Miller identifies a tragicomic mode as “the hidden unity” in Hughes’s writing; and Monika Kaup recognizes, in Hughes’s poetry, “the fluid dynamic of the Black Atlantic” in “an ongoing rhythm” between “an abstract state of exile and . . . homecoming and national inclusion.”1 I argue that what some critics might identify as a mutual exclusivity in Hughes’s career between the primarily aesthetic and formal concerns of a black vernacular or blues poetry and the less aesthetically focused but more politically engaged and socially radical writing2consider, for example, the difference between Hughes’s 1927 collection of poetry Fine Clothes to the Jew and his 1938 pamphlet of radical verse A New Song-can also be framed as elements of an ongoing cosmopolitan project that he continued to refine throughout his life as a writer.
