Langston Hughes, Of His Time

We're of our time too.

Image: Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

I just read M.L. Rosenthal’s 1967 New Modern Poetry anthology, which focused on postwar poetry. It’s a fun time-capsule. Way back in the mid-60s, the poetry canon looked substantially different than it does now. Robert Lowell was more important than Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Hughes was somewhat more important than Sylvia Plath. An obscure (but quite good!) T.S. Eliot associate named Anne Ridler made the cut; so did largely forgotten Scottish poet and gardner Ian Hamilton Finlay. Not John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara though—now almost universally viewed as two of the most important poets of the period.

These elisions are by way of curiosities now. It’s cute that Rosenthal got the New York School so ridiculously wrong, but it doesn’t exactly matter. Other misses are more consequential and more depressing though.

Specifically, Rosenthal doesn’t include any non-white poets except for Amiri Baraka, who is represented by a single poem (“Way Out West,” dedicated to Gary Snyder, a lesser poet given a much larger selection.) Gwendolyn Brooks, who is arguably the single most influential poet of the period not named Ashbery or O’Hara, is skipped entirely. So is Robert Hayden, who had published multiple well-received volumes by the time the anthology was released. Rosenthal could perhaps be forgiven for missing less celebrated figures like Owen Dodson and Samuel Allen—if he didn’t hoover up seemingly every white poet who picked up a pen to describe the English countryside.

People Make The Time They’re Of

In situations like this, where you can point to fairly obvious and egregious racism in a past work of art and/or scholarship, people will often say, “well, you can’t really blame Rosenthal. He was just of his time.”

It’s trivially true that Rosenthal was of his time, because everyone is of their time. But the thing is, Gwendolyn Brooks was of her time too. She was the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Her work was admired and commented upon. So was Robert Hayden’s. Rosenthal wasn’t ignorant of their work—or shouldn’t have been. He just made a more or less deliberate decision to represent the entire Black tradition of poetry in his day by a single poem. His racism was of its time, certainly—but his racism was also an effort to define his poetic moment as (almost entirely) white.

Rosenthal wasn’t especially influential. But that wasn’t through lack of trying. He put together his anthology hoping to codify a particular (white) canon of poetry. When we say people are “of their time” we speak as if time’s past (and time present) are static, uniform—as if no one has a capacity to affect their own time. But the Pulitzer committee was making a statement about Black literary achievement when they gave Brooks the prize. And Rosenthal was making a statement about Black literary achievement when he gave more pages in his anthology to white writers like Bishop and Lowell writing about Black people than to Black people writing about themselves.

Who Gets to Evaluate Who

One poem that Rosenthal might have included in his anthology was Langston Hughes’ classic “Theme for English B,” written in 1951. Hughes was 50 at the time, but the poem is a dramatic monlogue about a twenty-two year old at Columbia University (where Hughes had studied in his youth.) The student is given an assignment by his white instructor who tells him to write a personal essay; “let the page come out of you—/Then, it will be true.”) So the student starts to write:

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.   
I went to school there, then Durham, then here   
to this college on the hill above Harlem.   
I am the only colored student in my class. 

Hughes’ poem is mostly free verse, in an easy, natural rhythm that sounds almost more conversational than conversation. He includes some end and internal rhymes, too, though, which give the poem a very slight sing-song lilt, half lyrical (like the writer can’t be kept in the box of prose) half mocking (like he’s making fun of the assignment.)

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me   
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.   
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?

The answer to who? isn’t a vaunting declaration of universality, a la Whitman. It’s not an internal puzzle box of self and absence, like Dickinson, either. Instead, Hughes’ English B student is a specific person, existing in America in 1950—which means his race is an important part of who he is.  

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.   
So will my page be colored that I write?  
 
Being me, it will not be white.

The student is not defined by race—he likes Bessie, bop, and Bach, musicians Black and white, just like anyone of any race can like any music. But, at the same time, his composition has to be about his Blackness, if only because racist assumptions means that he has to explain that his Blackness isn’t all that he is, or doesn’t determine everything he likes or loves.

The essay doesn’t just acknowledge the student’s Blackness, though. It writes, or inscribes, whiteness on the instructor. Whiteness is often assumed to be the default, unmarked and unremarked upon. That’s why you can put together a 270 page poetry anthology of (almost) all white people, and count on critics not noticing or commenting on it. Intellectuals, writers, teachers, professors, knowers aren’t Black—a default assumption that Hughes and his speaker, both writers, both Black, are very much aware of. By speaking of himself as a Black writer, the student makes the teacher’s whiteness visible, and non-normative.

The student finishes the poem by deftly switching the assumptions of the assignment. The teacher said the student should write from himself, and then the theme will be about the student. But the poem explains that anything from the student will also be about the instructor; they are not separable, one from the other, just as segregation, no matter how enforced, is never total.

You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.   
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

With those last rhymes (“and somewhat more free./ This is my page for English B”) the theme, and the poem, click shut like a door closing. The truth has been spoken, but it’s contained within a structure, and an assignment, that isn’t built to hold it, or respond to it. The student has given more of himself than the professor had a right to expect, but there’s little hope that the professor will respond by stepping away from his or her authority, or by modifying expectations, or by giving anything of himself. Honesty, brilliance, craft, indirect mockery and direct accusation; they all thump against the walls of institutional inertia.

Still This Time

I think, in its easy, perfect beauty, in its honesty and in its unexpectedly flat expectation that honesty will do little, “Theme From English B” has a strong claim to be one of the great American poems of the 20^th century, or just of ever.

It’s rarely considered such, though. Hughes occupies an odd place in American poetry. He is often praised, but that praise frequently feels like a dismissal. His accessibility makes him an uneasy fit for the decades-long academization of American poetry (in which both Lowell and Ashbery took part.) His engagement with race and racism makes him an uncomfortable lesson plan for many high school classrooms. His reserve has made his radical heirs ambivalent. “Hughes was a great poet who wrote respectable poems,” Terrance Hayes said in 2018.

I don’t know that “Theme for English B” is exactly respectable, though, unless a scalpel, wielded to draw blood, is respectable. It feels like it could almost be written to Rosenthal, and to respectable poets and teachers who assign to themselves the power and responsibility to decide who is a writer and who gets to speak about themselves and about others.  

The point here isn’t that white Americans now are better than Hughes’ instructor, or than Rosenthal. The point is that white Americans aren’t. Rosenthal’s time isn’t a whole lot different than our time. There are still anthologies to organize, canons to create, institutions to build (where Black history and literature are again as ever under assault). “Unable to mention/something as abstract as time,” Baraka wrote in “Way Out West.” Or as Hughes wrote in 1951, “Tomorrow may be/a thousand years off.” What you would do is always what you are doing. We’re of our time, too, which means the time is what we make it, free or less so.