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Harlem Renaissance Literary Analysis

Decent Essays

Writers have criticized society by striving to stray away from truths in previous time periods. Realist writers have adapted from the Romantic ideals by focusing the lives of ordinary people in a concrete way instead of using poetic language or abstract thought. The authors of the Harlem Renaissance authors break from these social norms and bring forth their pain and suffering to America. Through their writings, these authors awaken society by exposing the racism against the African American race. Modernist poets and writers use their individual talents to speak about their personal experience so readers can find multiple morals in it; they became less nostalgic and more focused on the present day. While writers have different ways of critiquing American society during these three periods, they try to improve people’s understanding of the world based their perspective of the world. As a result, the authors from these different time periods have similar qualities of critiquing society; they want to escape from society, to discover truth, and to awake …show more content…

He says, “I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind / And did He stoop to quibble could tell… / [Why] flesh that mirrors Him must some day die…” (Cullen 1056-57). He questions about how a good God, who loves His children very much, makes them go through suffering. Despite his question, he concludes with a paradox of how God uses suffering to create something beauty, in regards to relating the suffering of American Americans to poetry. He says, “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (Cullen 1057). He is surprised that God has made him a poet to write about his struggles, showing his readers that God can turn a man’s situation around to create beauty through his

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