Research Catalog

Title

The weary blues / Langston Hughes ; introduction by Carl Van Vechten ; with a new foreword by Kevin Young.

Author

Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967

Publication

• New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
• ©1926

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964
• Young, Kevin, 1970-

Description

xxvi, 91 pages; 20 cm

Summary

"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race. Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal," and, he concludes, they are the expression of "an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is "celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream," and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American "I" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins "I, too, sing America," but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies," the young Hughes offers, "That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world.""--

Uniform Title

Poems. Selections

Alternative Title

Poems.

Subjects

• Poetry
• American poetry > African American authors
• POETRY > American > General
• POETRY > General
• POETRY > American > African American
• Black author

Genre/Form

Poetry.

Note

• "Published January 1926"--Title page verso.

Call Number

Sc C 15-90

ISBN

• 9780385352970
• 0385352972

LCCN

2014043213

OCLC

897437057

Author

Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967, author.

Title

The weary blues / Langston Hughes ; introduction by Carl Van Vechten ; with a new foreword by Kevin Young.

Publisher

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Copyright Date

©1926

Edition

Second edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Local Note

Schomburg copy with dust jacket.

Local Subject

Black author.

Added Author

Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964, writer of introduction.

Young, Kevin, 1970- writer of foreword.

Research Call Number

Sc C 15-90