This essay compares three literary works — Langston Hughes's "Harlem: A Dream Deferred," W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen," and Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" — through the shared theme of human dreams and society's impact upon them. Hughes warns of the explosive danger of suppressing an entire community's aspirations. Auden depicts a bureaucratic, mechanized state that erases individuality and reduces citizens to numbers. Dylan, by contrast, offers a hopeful vision of social change and the eventual fulfillment of long-deferred dreams. Together, the three works form a nuanced conversation about conformity, resistance, and the human need for self-realization.
Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'," Langston Hughes's "Harlem: A Dream Deferred," and W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" all investigate the themes of human goals and the impact of society upon those goals. Hughes's poem analyzes how the deferment of life goals by society can result in great destruction to both the individual and the community. Auden's poem also examines the loss of life goals, this time through the overarching control of a mechanized, soulless state and the pressure of conformity. In contrast, Dylan's lyrics provide hope for the realization of dreams through social change.
In "Harlem: A Dream Deferred," Langston Hughes investigates the destructive impact of deferring dreams. In his opening line, Hughes sets up a rhetorical question — "What happens to a dream deferred?" — and then proceeds to explore the effects of life goals that are delayed or put off. Clearly, Hughes wants to convey the idea that any life goal that is deferred yields a negative outcome. Furthermore, his inclusion of the word "Harlem" in the title signals that the poem reflects the destruction of life goals within the African American community that Harlem symbolizes.
Hughes's poem describes the effect of life goals that must be postponed until society changes and its laws and institutions are ready to accept African Americans. While waiting for that moment, Hughes lists several possible reactions. Dreams may simply wither and "dry up," lie dormant beneath the surface and "fester like a sore," become putrid "like rotten meat," or grow unusable from neglect and "crust and sugar over." Perhaps the most striking alternative is the implied violence of Hughes's final stanza, where he suggests that unfulfilled goals may "explode." This can be read as a warning to the broader society about the inherent danger of suppressing the hopes of an entire people, who may "explode" with anger and frustration. Alternatively, Hughes may be speaking on an individual level, suggesting that unfulfilled dreams can cause a person to "explode" with despair and commit an act of self-destruction.
W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" offers a subtly different thematic perspective on the value of human hopes and individuality than Hughes's "Harlem: A Dream Deferred." Auden's poem explores a society in which happiness and freedom have been lost to the overwhelming control of a bureaucratic state. Human dreams and goals are surrendered to the mindless, mechanized apparatus of government. Individuals are reduced to numbers, and the unknown citizen's life is defined entirely by his conformity and his absence of defiance. Where Hughes sees the loss of dreams as a destructive and potentially explosive outcome, Auden presents the loss of dreams and individuality as the quiet inevitability of a society in which a valuable life is defined by a paint-by-numbers existence.
"Dylan offers hope through defiance and social change"
Through their different treatments of the theme of deferred dreams, Dylan, Hughes, and Auden reveal different implications for society. In Hughes's "Harlem: A Dream Deferred," he investigates the destructive impact of deferring dreams, while Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" examines the impact of conformity on the loss of human dreams. In contrast, Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" is a hopeful and defiant look at how social change can bring about the realization of opportunities and dreams.
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