Change in the American canon of poetry

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a man that can be known for his insight into urban life on the streets of Harlem.  He struggles though opposition because of his race and rises above expectations to be a leader and activist in the civil rights movement. He steps over boundaries in his time that no other African American writer had ever crossed and makes it possible for many others to do so in the future. Hughes gives hope to many people while angering others who do not want change and resent such an offensive view of life in Harlem. This paper will discuss a brief history of his life and some of his work, professional and personal critiques of his work (Hughes, 45-96). It will also have a personal evaluation of his work and why I choose Hughes to research.

Hughes works were received well by people in the literacy world who were his target audience (Nichols 1) but his works outraged his fellow race in Harlem.  Hughes wrote about how  as he saw life on the streets and in the clubs in Harlem  and for not creating some fantasies about how life was for an African American in his time.  Hughes wrote what he saw, what he knew and felt. The themes of his poetry came from his own personal life, his travels and his involvement in the radical and protest movements (Nichols 1) taking place.  Some people believed that he was shaming his own race  in a degrading way through his poetry, however he was showing his contempt for the way society treated him and his brothers.  He was “determined to reflect the everyday lives of the working class culture” (Hughes, 45-96). Hughes showed the world how beautiful he and his race was, as well as how horrible they were being treated.  The fact his works were receiving  such attention proves that it was having a powerful effect on people reading it.

Emile Durkheim's

To more fully understand Stevens' poem "The Idea of Order at Key West," one can look at the ideas of the poem in context of social-philosophical thought. Emile Durkheim's theories on religion closely parallel those of Stevens. Both men believe that there is no supreme greater being, or God, that gives things order and meaning. But both men also believe that humans need to read order and meaning into the world to understand it, even if the meaning humans imply is false because there is no God. Since this aspect of both men's ideas is so similar, Durkheim's outline of ideas on religion can form a model by which Stevens' poem can be analyzed. Furthermore, although there is no way to prove that Steven's poem is based on Durkheim's ideas, there are enough similarities that the two sets of ideas can be compared (Durkheim, 104-197).

Both Stevens and Durkheim believe that humans read order into the world to aid in understanding. In general, Durkheim believed that humans create religion as a way to give events meaning and ...