Theme for English B

This first-person, free-verse poem has five stanzas of widely varying length, and, while some of its lines rhyme, there is no set rhyme pattern. Such a spontaneous, intuitive formal quality characterizes jazz poetry, and this genre has special consequence within the dramatic situation: Jazz poetry’s cultural mythos informs the spirit of the poem, yielding a distinctly Black voice whose Blackness is the occasion for the poetic utterance. The speaker is a Black college student who lives in Harlem but is from the South—an identity that carries complexities and complications unappreciated by his white peers.

Four of the five stanzas concern the process of writing an assignment. The longest stanza, the fourth stanza, is the assignment itself. The first and last stanzas are the shortest—only one line each.

The first stanza, essentially a dialogue tag, clarifies that the following stanza quotes “[t]he instructor” (Line 1). This quote is written in italics, further distinguishing the separate voice, and contains the writing prompt from the titular class “English B.” The one-page assignment should “come out of you” (Line 4). The content’s autobiographical (or confessional) nature will, says the instructor, make the writing “true” (Line 5). In other words, the teacher asks the students to write honestly about themselves.

Upon hearing this idealistic assertion, the speaker’s scrutiny is immediate. The third stanza describes the speaker’s reaction to the prompt and his journey “home” (Line 2) to do the assignment. He initially wonders if it is “that simple” (Line 6) to write what is “true” (Line 5) and then describes himself. First, he lists his age and race: “I am twenty-two, colored” (Line 7). The historically racist trappings of the word “colored” (Line 7) implicitly but immediately foreground the racism of the speaker’s environment, and the descriptor, as one of the first the speaker uses to describe himself, indicates that society sees him as Black above anything else. The speaker then lists his hometown, Winston-Salem, which is in North Carolina, indicating that he has a Southern accent. Many people in the United States, especially in New York, believe the stereotype that people with Southern accents are less intelligent.

With a biting economy—the breadth of a single line—the speaker exposes his instructor’s privileged romanticism. A white student may be able to unworriedly indulge their self-expression (let the page “come out of [them]” [Line 4]) and take for granted that their audience will see it “[truly]” (Line 5), but this is not so for the speaker, whose communal identity is relentlessly mediated by others’ prejudices. While the lines carry an edge of exasperation, however, the tone is predominantly restrained and reflective. In the following lines, the speaker elaborates on aspects of his identity and their various, unappreciated complexities. Immediately following his self-descriptions of age and race, the speaker contradicts the stereotype of unintelligence by mentioning his education. Not only did he go to school in his hometown, but he attended classes in the larger city of “Durham” (Line 8). Nevertheless, at the “college on the hill above Harlem” (Line 9), the speaker is the only Black “student in [his] class” (Line 10). According to the editors of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, and the directions included in the poem, the “college” (Line 9) is City College of the City University of New York (CCNY), the flagship campus of the City University of New York (CUNY) system of schools (page 675).

The following lines detail the journey from the college in Hamilton Heights to the Harlem YMCA. The speaker “cross[es] St. Nicholas” (Line 12), the street bordering the park of the same name, and reaches the “Harlem Branch Y” (Line 14) after crossing two more streets. In addition to emphasizing the particularity of lived experience, the specificity of the streets and buildings ground the poem in the boroughs of New York City, making it an important thematic element. Moreover, the largely Black neighborhood partly constitutes the speaker’s identity—an identity whose complexity and lived experience will likely not be seen “[truly]” (Line 5) because they are not shared by white peers. Once home, the speaker sets himself to work, “sit[ting] down and writ[ing] this page:” (Line 15). The colon ending the line indicates that the next stanza is the text of the assignment.

The fourth stanza is the speaker’s written response to the instructor’s prompt. It returns to some of the third stanza’s thoughts. For instance, “It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me” (Line 16), which reinforces “I wonder if it’s that simple” (Line 6). The stanza also repeats diction from the prompt itself with the word “true” (Line 5, 16). The speaker again includes his age, but he omits his hometown, focusing instead on his current residence, “Harlem” (Line 18). This New York borough is part of the speaker’s identity because it is his sensory experience (touch, sight, and sound).

After describing himself in dialogue with Harlem and New York, the speaker turns to things he enjoys: eating and drinking, as well as working and learning. More abstract activities, like “be[ing] in love” (Line 21) and trying to “understand life” (Line 22), are also included. Then, the speaker turns to what he collects, or what he would like to receive as a “Christmas present” (Line 23)—pipes and jazz records. The most salient quality of these experiences is their universal humanity—striking a pointed contrast with the racial division in the setting and producing one of the poem’s central ironies, on which the speaker then elaborates. While the speaker likes some of the “same things” (Line 26) as people of “other races” (Line 26), he thinks his writing is also influenced by Black culture, and he uses a metaphor of white versus “colored” (Line 27) paper to convey this thought. The question “So will my page be colored that I write?” (Line 27) reemphasizes the naiveté of the instructor’s assertions: Anything that “come[s] out of” (Line 4) the speaker will struggle to be “true” (Line 5) insofar as the speaker’s experiences will not have a neutral audience, and white society’s ideal of “truth” rarely deigns to fully engage the Black American experience.

However, despite this inexorable otherness, the speaker shows a resilience and loftiness of vision when he considers the tension of commonality and reflects on how the white instructor influences his writing. The speaker is in dialogue with the teacher, and this makes the two of them a “part” (Line 32) of each other. This exchange of multicultural ideas is distinctly “American” (Line 33), argues the speaker. While they may not desire to participate in one another’s identities, it is the truth of their shared experience—“true” (Line 36) is repeated a second time.

In the fourth stanza’s last four lines, the speaker points out that education is a two-way street. While the white instructor educates the Black student, the Black student also educates the white instructor; they “learn” (Line 37) from each other. However, the power imbalance in this relationship is highlighted: The instructor is “older” (Line 39) than the speaker’s repeated age of “twenty-two” (Lines 7, 17). More importantly, he has the privilege of being white and enjoys more freedom.

The fifth and final stanza is a single line reiterating that the previous stanza was the text of the assignment. The final words of this stanza, “for English B” (Line 41), echo the title, bringing the poem full circle.