on of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926. “Mother to Son” is a dramatic monologue, spoken not by the poet’s own voice but in a imagined speaker in this case a black mother to her son. Using a metaphor of a stairway, the mother tells her son that the journey of life resembles a long, hard, dark stairway than a glide down a “crystal stair”. The “crystal stair” is a metaphor for the American dream and its promise that all Americans shall have equal opportunities. In this poem, Hughes represents the personal, collective, and spiritual importance of struggle, endurance, and faith. Langston Hughes has earned a place amongst the greatest poets America has ever produced. More than that, Hughes has given a voice to the African American experience. Hughes poetry announced to the world that the streets of black America contained a culture rich and vibrant. This announcement was to become his life’s mission, something he foretold long before his name became a household name. Countee Cullen was another contributor to the Harlem Renaissance expressing the themes in the life of his race and the shedding of light on social reality. Countee Cullen, a black middle-class New Yorker, experienced these issues mostly in a divisive fashion: he wanted to be a traditional poet but felt it his duty to speak about a black experience that was not entirely his own. As a poet Cullen was conservative, he did not ignore racial themes, but based his works on the models of Nineteenth century Romantic poets. He urged Langston Hughes to avoid black jazz rhythms in his poetry and wrote: ’Yet do I marvel at this curious thing/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!’ His desire to be known as a poet, not as a black poet, is central to “Yet Do I Marvel.” In this poem the character does not doubt God’s goodness or his willingness to explain curious phenomena, but he has finally been pushed to ...
