Langston Hughs Poem Langston Hughes\'

Langston Hughs Poem

Langston Hughes' Let America Be America Again

One of the greatest poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes introduces an essential reality of the American history in his work, Let America be America Again. The poem ironically discusses the American Dream and its intrinsic falseness. Hughes thus portrays the American history as a failure to respect the propositions and principles it had set for itself in the beginning. The failure of the American Dream is denounced by the series of persecutions pervading the American history. Hughes thus enumerates all the victims of the treacherous dream: the Native Indians who were savagely dispossessed of their land by the settlers, the African-Americans who were enslaved, the poor white people who became the victims of capitalism. As an African-American, Hughes feels he is one of those whose democratic ideals have been dreadfully cheated by the American history.

The poem's structure is composed so as to deceive the reader at first sight, by luring him into believing that the text is in fact a nostalgic hymn, lamenting the ideal past of the American nation. The first stanzas however are deftly interrupted by parentheses, in which the poet excludes himself from the common past of the American people: "Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain. / Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.)"(Hughes) Through this device the author already hints at the basic encroachment of democracy through the persecution of the African-Americans. Moreover, the lines cited above deconstruct their own intended meaning by adding an almost unnoticeable element: the pronoun 'himself' which indicates that the 'pioneers' where selfishly looking for a home where they should be free, while others are enslaved.

The same procedure is continued over the next few lines, as the poet seems to deplore the lost past and at the same time to abstract himself from the mass as one that has never benefited from the main principles of equality and democracy such as they were stated in the beginning of the American history. Hughes subtly attacks the failure of the American democracy to do better than the monarchical systems it had once so severely inveighed: "O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / but opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe. / (There's never been equality for me, / nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free.')"(Hughes) as Anthony Dawahare observes, Let America Be America Again offers a critical view of the failure of the American Dream which was never actually fulfilled: "[...] a lament for the failure of the 'American dream' and a plea for a truly democratic and egalitarian America. The point of the poem is relatively simple: the democratic and egalitarian ideal of "America" does not and has never existed in practice because of class inequality, because of 'those who live like leeches on the people's lives'"(Dawahare, 28) the ideal land has only existed as an idea, because in practice it has been denounced by the unjust and discriminatory policies used. Dawahare further emphasizes that the poem is sarcastic since the title and the refrain are undermined by the text itself which testifies the absence of a pre-existent ideal America: "The poem is highly ironic since the title and refrain -- 'let America be America again' -- is undermined in the poem by the absence of a pre-existent manifestly ideal America. In Hughes characteristically multiracial perspective, the dispossessed include Native Americans, working class European immigrants, blacks, and poor whites."(Dawahare, 28) the poem thus overthrows the traditional view of the virginal and sublime beginnings of American history. Instead the whole fundament of the Dream is rotten and corrupted and the perfect democracy never existed.

The body of the poem openly unmasks the series of social persecutions which have turned the American dream into a nightmare. As a participant in the American history, the author feels that he was among those deceived by the empty promises of democracy and equality: "Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream / in the Old World while still a serf of kings, / Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, / That even yet its mighty daring sings / in every brick and stone, in every furrow turned / That's made America the land it has become."(Hughes) Slowly the negative tone of the poem changes and Hughes directs his views to the future of the nation, where the American Dream still remains to be fulfilled: "O, let America be America again-- / the land that never has been yet-- / and yet must be -- the land where every man is free. / the land that's mine -- the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME -- /Who made America..."(Hughes) There is hope that the land will become at some point the promise it was in the beginning. The beauty and strength of the American Dream is reinstated in its power and thus it becomes an ideal still to be reached.

Hughes enthusiastically declares that the true owners of the land are in fact the dispossessed: the Indians, the blacks, the poor. The poem concludes thus with a vision that the American Dream is in fact a prophecy still to be realized in the future by those who have dreamt it: "O, yes, / I say it plain, / America never was America to me, / and yet I swear this oath-- / America will be!"(Hughes) America failed in its historical mission but it can still succeed in the future precisely because it was founded by such a beautiful dream.