Poetry and Reason

 For those of you who follow this blog, you already know that I often turn to history in an effort to make sense of the present.  However, I also find poetry a source of clarity, and I will share part of a poem I recently read.  (Please excuse the condensing of the stanzas.) 

"Let America be America again.  Let it be the dream it used to be.  Let it be the pioneer on the plain seeking a home where he himself is free.  

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love, where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme that any man be crushed by one above.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe."

As I read the 3 stanzas of this poem, it spoke to me about the division among Americans today, I thought of the divisiveness in Washington, the voting on such strict party lines.   

However, my sharing of the 3 opening stanzas omitted something important that the poet included between each stanza, concluding with "There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free' ".  

Image:  Library of Congress

The poet is Langston Hughes, a poet born in 1901, who died in 1967.  He wrote that poem in 1936, and while Black men had been given the right to vote in the 15th Amendment in 1870, attempted legal impediments and violence significantly delayed actual voting for many.  He certainly grew up in and continued to live in an era of separate drinking fountains, schools, restaurants, and much more. Consequently, he added between the opening stanzas of his poem, 'America never was America to me."  Yet, it is important to remember that he wrote the poem in 1936, and he lived through many changes in America after that.

His family history is important.  Both of his Great Grandmothers were enslaved, and both Great Grandfathers were their owners.  His Grandmother attended Oberlin College, and the man she married joined John Brown and was fatally wounded in the attack.  She remarried, and her husband brought their family to Kansas.  They were both educators, and their daughter and her husband remained in the same area of Missouri and Kansas, although he left the family to seek a more welcoming country.  Their son, Langston Hughes received most of his education in Lawrence, Kansas.

Langston Hughes is known for his novels, short stories, plays, poetry, operas, essays, and work for children.  At the time he wrote the poem I shared he had been invited with a group of Blacks planning to make a film in Russia.  The film was never made, but he did travel in China, Japan, and Korea.  Given his travels and his writings such as the one I shared, it is not surprising that he was among those hounded by Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Hughs explained the accusations against him that he did not have political feelings, nor did he read political documents.  Rather, his travels were an emotional effort "to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself."

What deeply changed his thinking was the willingness of Black soldiers, and perhaps particularly the Tuskegee Airmen, known as the Red Tails, who were willing to give their lives fighting for America in WW II.

Having researched all of that, I went back to his poem.  Yes, there is resentment and disappointment, yet there is also hope.  He wrote:  "I am a young man, full of strength and hope..., A Dream--Still beckoning to me!  O, let America be America again--The land that never has been yet--And yet must be--The land that's mine--The poor man's, Indian, Negro, ME--Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again."  

He concludes with these words:  We, the people, must redeem our land, the mines, the plants, the rivers, The mountains and the endless plain--All, all the stretch of these great green states--And make America again!

I don't believe most people think of Langston Hughes as a Kansan but just listen to his closing words:  America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath--America will be!  An ever-living seed, Its dream lies deep in the heart of me.  We, the people, must redeem Our land, the mines, the plain--All, all the stretch of these great green states--And make America again!

Yes, he did write "America never was America to me" between the first 3 stanzas of his poem," and many Americans today, in conclusion of the first month of our President, may be questioning whether America is excluding them, ignoring the Constitution they love.  But, in the end, Langston Hughes found hope.