Langston Hughes's Constructivist Poetics

This essay explores the relationship between Langston Hughes's 1930s poetry and the Soviet avant-garde theater. It argues that the constructivist theater provides an aesthetic framework through which to read Hughes's radical poetry. Often read as an artistic failure, Hughes's 1930s verse-especially his 1938 pamphlet A New Song-represents, I suggest, a formal response to shifting ideologies of poetic labor, namely, an effort to disentangle poetry from capitalist individualism and align it with proletarian collective labor. I argue that Hughes's socialist poems represent an attempt to refigure poetic labor as a collective act, and I explore the implications that this has for the survival of the lyric poem and lyric modes of address. This article devotes sustained attention to a long-neglected period of Hughes's career and provides a new reading of the Soviet avant-garde's influence on US culture in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, it shows that these concerns and tensions are relevant to a broader arc of African American poetic history, from the twentieth century to the poetry of the present day.