Langston Hughes’s Poetry and the Metaphysics of Simplicity

Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, in their edition of the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, tell us that while for “many readers of African descent” Hughes “is their poet laureate,” for “a substantial number of readers and, especially, scholar-critics, Hughes’s approach to poetry was far too simple and unlearned” (3). Indeed, Hughes’s contemporary from the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen, considered Hughes’s poetry to be so artless that he “wondered whether some of Langston Hughes’s poems were poems at all” (Ikonne 151). And by 1985, Rampersad could still say, lamentably, that

[w]ith few exceptions, literary critics have resisted offering even a modestly complicated theory concerning his creativity. His relentless affability and charm, his deep, open love of the black masses, his devotion to their folk forms, and his insistence on writing poetry that they could understand, all have contributed to the notion that Langston Hughes was intellectually and emotionally shallow.

(“Origins” 180)

These views result from the deceptive lightness of Hughes’s style and the games he plays with voice and tone. As a result, critics have tended to conflate Hughes’s own consciousness with those of the “blues people” who appear in his poems, and to neglect the proper materials by which a poet such as Hughes does his thinking. Hughes’s poetry is simple but not simplistic. The kind of simplicity Hughes creates is not only difficult to achieve and intellectually challenging, it calls for a whole “metaphysics of simplicity.”

Associations in readers’ minds about the concepts of heaviness and lightness date back, in the West, more than two-thousand years. Hughes’s poetry is frequently quite light, even when his subject matter is the heavy problem of suffering and loss of hope, as is the case, for instance, in his volume Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). Where we expect, in “Harlem,” a cry of pain, Hughes dances playfully through a series of questions.¹ Of course, the experiences he alludes to in the poem—frustration, bitterness, and rage—are anything but light, but because we are aware that the poem could be a straightforward howl of pain, the questions and the rhymes generate a vertiginous affect, “light” by comparison to the depths of anguish over which they hover. Yet lightness, in this instance, is anything but “intellectually and emotionally shallow”; it is a strategic move both for keeping fresh an awareness of ongoing betrayal and for asserting the betrayed’s refusal to be defined or defeated by that betrayal. And such a move turns on its head an ancient association of heavy art with what is profound and of light art with what is shallow.

As Czech writer Milan Kundera muses in his philosophical novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides “divided the world into pairs of opposites,” including lightness and heaviness, and he attributed positivity to lightness and negativity to heaviness (5). But later thinkers soon reversed Parmenides’ oppositions, and by the Romantic period centuries later Beethoven was not unusual in thinking that “only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy is valuable. . . . Beethoven’s hero is a lifter of metaphysical weights” (33). And Beethoven, in composing his last work, the Opus 135 String Quartet,

turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into a metaphysical truth. It is an interesting tale of light going to heavy . . . Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had transformed the seriousness of his quartet into . . . the most trifling of jokes.

(195–96)

But our sense of the inappropriate in this case would derive from the fact that “we no longer know how to think as Parmenides thought.” Kundera, however, assures us that both “history [and] . . . individual human life [are] unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow” (223). The whole “lightness/heaviness opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all” (6). We cannot see properly what Hughes is doing in his poetry if we come to...