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Article: "A little yellow bastard boy": paternal rejection, filial insistence, and the triumph of African American cultural aesthetics in Langston Hughes's "Mulatto".(Essays)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- College Literature
- Article date:
- March 22, 2008
- Author:
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On March 3, 1927, Langston Hughes, responding to an invitation from the Walt Whitman Foundation, addressed a small gathering at the poet's final residence on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey. In his talk, he credited Whitman as an ancestor. "I believe," he said, implicitly contrasting his and Whitman's democratic poetics with the typically opaque art of white modernist poets in their heyday, "that poetry should be direct, comprehensible, and the epitome of simplicity" (Rampersad 1986, 145-46). (1) Hughes's statement was itself characteristically direct; he and Whitman were self-consciously "people's poets" who deliberately wrote verse intended to be read and ...