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Let America Be America Be America Again, By Langston Hughes

Decent Essays

In his poems, Langston Hughes maintains that “America never was America to me” (Hughes, line 77). This powerful statement encapsulates the enduring impact of racial discrimination and segregation during Hughes’s life in the early 1900s. Throughout his poetry, he expresses the disconnection his race and other minorities have with the American ideologies of freedom and equality. He was heavily inspired by the injustices around him and was determined to create change through his writing. His poems, “Let America Be America Again”, “Harlem”, and “You and Your Whole Race” all provide profound insight into Hughes’s portrayal of America and his emotions regarding racial injustice. To begin, in the poem “Harlem”, Hughes uses literary techniques to compare Harlem’s deferred dream to a bomb. …show more content…

Hughes uses this simile to describe the dream as a shriveled raisin that is no longer juicy or nourishing. A raisin is tiny and unimportant, evidently; his writing gives us an idea that the dream is also small and insignificant. Additionally, Hughes compares a neglected dream to rotten meat, inquiring, “Does it stink like rotten meat?” (Hughes, line 6). Unlike old, rotting meat, fresh meat is nutritious, and if left out for too long, becomes repulsive and sickening. The central metaphor in this poem compares a dream to items with expiration dates, implying that the dream is old, expired, and revolting. To add on, completing the poem’s repetition, Hughes questions, “Or does it explode?” (Hughes, line 11). Hughes imagines the possibility that a dream might explode when deferred long enough. Instead of letting a dream sit and be ignored, people should follow their dreams instead of being oppressed; the dream is equality and the people are Hughes’s race. The poem “Harlem” considers the harm that is caused when the dream of racial equality is continuously

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