African History Commons^™

"It Don't Mean A Thing If It Got That Swing": Langston Hughes's Musical-Poetic Fusion Of The Vernacular And Literary Traditions, John Hall

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Early in his literary career, Langston Hughes was faced with a question that occupied his writing and led to an important innovation in American literature: how could Hughes describe the experiences of African-Americans while using the forms and traditions of a Western (i.e., predominantly Anglo-American) literary culture which often sought to exclude, even negate, the very experiences and oral traditions which he sought to express? Hughes's desire to create an individual poetic voice which could present the African-American community as a whole soon led him to modify traditional Western literary forms by incorporating African-American oral and vernacular forms into his …