Poet · Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes
American poet · 1902–1967
Langston Hughes wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" at nineteen, on a train crossing the Mississippi, and published it in The Crisis in 1921. Four years later, working as a hotel busboy in Washington, he left three poems beside the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsay — and woke up to newspaper headlines about the "busboy poet."
He became the defining voice of the Harlem Renaissance, the first poet to let blues and jazz set the rhythm of American verse, and the affectionate, unsparing chronicler of Black life he called the "poet laureate of Harlem."
A note on rights: Hughes's earliest published poems — including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), "Mother to Son" (1922), and "I, Too" (1926) — are in the US public domain because they were first published before 1931. His later work, including "Harlem" (1951), remains in copyright, so we discuss those classics with brief excerpts only.
3 poems by Langston Hughes
Full text, free to read — all in the public domain.
Langston Hughes's most famous poems
Later poems still in copyright — key lines and why they matter, with links to read each in full.
Harlem (A Dream Deferred)1951
What happens to a dream deferred?
The opening question of Montage of a Dream Deferred became one of the most quoted lines in American poetry. Hughes piles up similes of decay — a raisin in the sun, a festering sore, a sagging load — before the final, italicized possibility lands like a struck match. Lorraine Hansberry took the title of A Raisin in the Sun from this poem.
Read the full poem →Dream Variations
To fling my arms wideIn some place of the sun,
An early lyric of pure longing: to dance through the bright day and rest beneath a tall tree as night comes on gently. Its closing phrase, "Black like me," later gave John Howard Griffin the title of his famous 1961 book. The whirling, song-like movement shows how naturally Hughes folded music into verse from the start.
Read the full poem →The Weary Blues1925
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
Hughes's breakthrough won first prize in Opportunity magazine's 1925 contest and gave his 1926 debut collection its name. The poem does something American verse had never quite done: it lets an actual blues song play inside it, lyrics and all, until the listening poet and the piano man on Lenox Avenue blur into one. The collection remains under copyright, so we quote only this famous opening.
Read the full poem →Let America Be America Again1936
Let America be America again.Let it be the dream it used to be.
First published in Esquire during the Depression, this poem measures the distance between the country's promise and what its farmers, factory workers, and Black citizens actually received. An interrupting parenthetical voice — "America never was America to me" — gives it a double pulse of love and indictment. Politicians across the spectrum have been borrowing its title ever since.
Read the full poem →