SONNETS IN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE.
Harlem Renaissance poets used sonnets significantly to convey different messages to their African American fellows. The black people faced various problems in those times such as racism, poverty, illiteracy and most of all, slavery. They lived in fear and pain. The poets wrote sonnets some of them to comfort them but some to express their pain to the world. In this essay, we will contrast the works of Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay and Countee Cullen.
Langston Hughes expresses the hope for a better life to the Black Americans in his “Dream” sonnet. His strong wordings imply the pain of the Black Man in America. He takes us to the slavery that was ongoing by that period in time. However, in some of his sonnets, he writes of the joyous moments of the Negros too. His heartfelt poems display the common encounters of black people’s culture. He shows how the African Americans were forgotten and their dreams not considered at all. He depicts how far liberty and equality were from them. He writes in a point of view of deserted Jazz musicians in “The weary Blues”, frustrated Black students in “I, TOO” and so on. He believed it was because of their low social status that they did not openly pursue their dreams but rather hid them behind their fears.
In contrast, Countee Cullen, who was an editor in a magazine company, wrote sonnets that embraced both the black and white lives. This could probably be because he had gained formal education. In his work “Heritage”, Cullen visualizes the need to reclaim African arts – a movement called Negritude. In another sonnet “Dark Tower” he reviewed Langston’s “The Weary Blues” and pressed him not to be a racial artist. Generally, he tended to be more attracted to Romantic poetry and only promoted the unity of blacks and whites rather than resistance as Langston did. Themes become vivid in his works. Black Chauvinism was one, clearly seen in “The black Christ” and “The Brown Girl” works.
Claude Mckay was a rather lesser but concerned poet of the racism and malice against the black. He gives him “The Black Problem” sonnet a metaphorical approach. They are commencing it with “The halting footsteps of lass” which indicates metaphorically how black people followed the lass of economic oppression in the image of prostitution.