Langston Hughes: Dreams

​It’s curious how many of Langston Hughes’s poems either have the word “dream" in their title or deal with the subject of dreams. Ironically, his most famous poem, which begins “What happens to a dream deferred?” is actually titled “Harlem.”

Langston's “Dreams,” a short and simple poem that exhorts the reader to "hold fast to dreams." Even its evocations of a wounded or cold and sterile nature, "a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly," and "a barren field/Frozen with snow," have a quiet beauty.

James Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri a descendent of one of the freedom fighters who fought with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. When Langston was a boy he remembered that his grandmother still had a bloody shawl from the raid. It was one of his first lessons in black pride. As a child he was peripatetic, as his father abandoned the family and his mother had to travel to find work.

Langston’s desire to be a writer started early and he did a brief stint at Columbia University before he went to sea and traveled around Europe and West Africa, finding inspiration. When he came back to the States he was first an assistant to Carter G. Woodson, the great African American historian, then a busboy at a hotel. There, he met the writer Vachel Lindsay and pressed some of his poems upon him. Langston's first book of poetry came out shortly after.

Langston finally settled in Harlem after he graduated from Lincoln University, just in time to join the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African American artists, poets and writers. He became friends with the likes of Zora Neale Hurston. They had the same white patron, but most of all had an unabashed and even defiant love of black culture and history.

Langston wrote many collections of poetry, novels, short stories, non-fiction, children’s books and plays, including Mule Bone with Zora.

Langston died in 1967 and his ashes rest beneath the floor in the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the renown Harlem museum. It’s a most fitting place for them.