The Poet as Teacher: The Didactic Element in Langston Hughes's Black Poetry | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 14, Volume 59, Issue 1, July 2015, Page 429-460 PDF (369.46 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2015.106620 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Mona Salah El-Din Hassanein Hassanein | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| Emerging from the Horatian premise that literature should teach and delight, didactic works of literature possess an educational character alongside the dimension of aesthetic pleasure. Socially committed writers like the African American poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) often infuse into their poems an element of didacticism. Believing that a poet is a human being who must live within his time and for his people, Hughes became the voice of black America during the 1920s. Most of his poems are racial in theme, exploring the different facets of the black American experience. Making black people his major subject, Hughes used his poems as an agent for self-discovery, cultural change and specifically black uplift. He assumes multiple voices and employs a number of technical devices to teach the black masses to take pride in their heritage and struggle for a better future. In some of his poems, Hughes councils white America to give the darker brothers the freedom, justice and opportunity they deserve as an integral part of the American society. This study utilizes the formalistic and thematic approaches to explore the didactic note in Hughes's poems about the blacks. The historical approach is also employed to shed light on the contexts that urged him to write such "message" poems | ||||
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