I, too, am America: The Democratic Poetics of Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman

Abstract

The focus of this essay is to examine the poetry of Langston Hughes, specifically his poem I, too, and how it attempted to recontextualise the struggle for African American civil rights which would define the Civil Rights Movement of 1950’s and 60’s America. Hughes draws on the poetry of Walt Whitman, a poet who also employed democratic poetics in the wake of the Civil War. Hughes makes effective use of the poetic form and brevity of I, too to convey a clear and succinct microcosm of the US Civil Rights Movement. Both Whitman and Hughes created poetry which were deeply entrenched in the struggles of a people searching for meaning and identity in the wake of national upheaval. Hughes takes the building blocks which Whitman created for the US post-Civil War – which stressed the need for unity and strong leadership in a nation now free of slavery – and applies it to the struggles of African Americans still oppressed under the government of a segregated America. I, too functions as an empowered cry for freedom and equality for African Americans but also emphasises the need to create a separate and distinct identity – divorced from their status as purely ‘Americans’ – with their freedom, evoking Hughes’ own essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in its desire for a unique national identity and literary tradition, an idea which shaped the Harlem Literary Renaissance and served to define the growth of black consciousness within the US.