Montage of a Dream Deferred

Langston Hughes · 1951 CE · Poem · Modern / American · Contemporary

Some ninety short pieces meant to be read as one long poem, set in the blocks between Lenox and Eighth avenues over a single Harlem day and night: a landlady, a night-funeral insurance man, a college student with an assignment, a boy who wants to play bebop, a woman ironing at four in the morning. Hughes's headnote says the sequence takes its structure from bebop, with its conflicting changes, sudden nuances, broken rhythms and interjections. The Harlem Renaissance had been over for twenty years, and this is the book that gave the postwar city its form in verse.

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  Langston Hughes · 1951 CE · Poem — contained in this
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  Langston Hughes · 1951 CE · Poem — contained in this

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