Standard English and Non-Standard English
most of his childhood in Lawrence. After his grandmother died, he lived with family friends for two years. Then, he lived with his mother who married again in
Ohio. He grew up and studied in Lincoln University, a historically black
university in Pennsylvania. Then, he started to write collected poems there. In short, he died in May 22, 1967 from complications after abdominal surgery,
related to prostate cancer, at the age of 65. His ashes are put in the Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture in Harlem, and the entrance to an ausitorium
is his name. b.
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist,
novelist, playwright, and comunist. He composes 868 poems and divided them into five decades. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art
called jazz poetry. He is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. “The
Negro was in vogue” is a famous period he writes that was paraphrased as “When Harlem was in vogue”.
All his poems are arranged in order and edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. All of the poems 860 were published by the writer during his
lifetime based on the date and place of publication for each poem. He is best known for his poems about African life, and he was also a political poet who was
paid for radical views. This poem was written at the time of Harlem Renaissance where
it was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem,
New York. During the time, it was known as the New Negro Movement ”. At that
time, jazz poetry is very popular because it demonstrated jazz-like rhythm or the feel of improvisation. Thus, Langston Hughes wrote his poems related to song or
dance because it depicted the era where whites and blacks enjoy jazz music that had a soft, slow, and easy rhythm to listen. Whites usually listened to the jazz
song and they danced accompanied by African-American who played the banjo. Moreover, this poet used terms and names related to the slavery era, e.g.
cotton field, mulatto, Eliza, Alfred, etc. Those terms and names depicted racism condition at that time. Cotton field portrayed where African-American spent their
most of time when they became the slaves of whites. Then, mulatto is a term that means
the first-generation offspring of a black person and a white person. Furthermore, Eliza is a name for a girl that taken from Eliza Moore who
was one of the last proven African-American former slaves living in the United States.
Alfred is the one of the last living survivors of slavery in the United States who had a clear recollection of it. The use of terms and names in The Collected Poems
of Langston Hughes helped the researcher and the readers understand the condition of African-
American’s life at that time.