As we’ve been discussing, the Harlem Renaissance
represented an outpouring of poetry, prose, art and
music that highlighted different aspects and voices of African-American writers and artists. From the jazz
and blues poetry of Langston Hughes to the sonnets of Countee Cullen and angry poetry of Claude
McKay and vernacular-heavy stories of Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance, as a whole, sought
to display African-American life to mainstream American life in all of its variety and depth. As we read in
the essays by Alain Locke (“The New Negro”) and Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain”), the underlying currents of pride in Black culture, self-determination by Black people, and
artistic freedom were important aspects of the Harlem Renaissance.
For this essay (4 page minimum), I would like you to choose at least 3 poems, stories or essays and
analyze them both thematically and stylistically. By thematically, I mean, generally- what is the work
about? What is the author trying to convey? How is he or she relating the work to the historical and
social context in which it is written? What, as far as you can tell, are they responding to? Is the poem,
story or essay a protest, a commentary, or something else?
By stylistically, I am asking about the form of the work. Oftentimes, the form of a work (is it free verse,
or written as a lyric to be performed with musical accompaniment? Does it use standard English or
vernacular? If a poem- does it rhyme? Is metaphor, simile or imagery used and if so, that what effect?
How does the style help highlight the theme, if at all?
Overall, what are there works, and the way they are written, saying about the role of African-American
art, culture and people in American life in the 1920s?