Lament for Dark Peoples by Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes is widely known for his simple and open poems with messages that are not coated in so many artistic and figurative language and imagery. During the 1920s as many poets turned inward and wrote covertly, Langston chose to go outward and speak extrovertly about his subject. He is a poet who is preoccupied with the reclaiming of the pride of the dark skinned people and asserting their identities in the fast changing world and the apparent segregation that was manifest in the early 1920s. In most of his poem he identified the recognition of the origin of the dark skinned people, Africa, as being the distant past that should have remained and the dark skinned people would not have had trouble as they were in the foreign land.
This poem under study is not an exemption to the subject matter that Langston dealt with repeatedly. The persona here feels caged in a foreign land...
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