18 pages • 36 minutes read
Langston HughesTheme for English B
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Racial Difference in the College Classroom
Being Black in an academic institution is a primary theme in “Theme for English B.” The speaker mentions his Blackness several times in the poem, and he notes that he is the only Black “student in [his] class” (Line 10). Even in the 21st century, this reflects the experience of many Black academics—being vastly outnumbered by students of other races. Hughes himself had a similar experience when he studied at Columbia University, where campus racism drove him to withdraw.
After leaving this predominantly white university, Hughes went on to receive several degrees from the first Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in America, Lincoln University. According to Lincoln University’s Langston Hughes Memorial Library website, Hughes “refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people without personalizing them, so the reader could step in and draw his own conclusions.”
One aspect of being Black in academia is combating stereotypes. For instance, when the young, Black speaker of Hughes’s poem lists the activities he enjoys, he mentions “sleep[ing]” (Line 21) but quickly follows with “read[ing]” (Line 22); this combats the stereotype that Black men are lazy. The speaker’s hobbies demonstrate that one can enjoy both naps and books.
Another aspect of being a Black academic is expanding the definition of pedagogy, or structures of learning. The word “learn” appears three times in the poem. Learning is something the speaker says he “like[s]” (Line 22). In Lines 37 and 38, “learn[ing]” is something both the speaker and his teacher do in their shared experience of the classroom. This precedes Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968); Freire develops the idea of the teacher and student learning from each other rather than knowledge and learning flowing in one direction.
The theme is fully developed when the speaker highlights how the instructor’s race and age give him dramatically more power than a young Black man. Part of the legacy of American slavery is that white people are “more free” (Line 40) than Black people; this dynamic finds diverse expression in the US, and at the time of the poem’s creation, de jure segregation was not yet outlawed. Academia takes part in the structuring of power that privileges those who are not descendants of slaves, in the 1940s as well as in the 21st century.
Jazz Music
Hughes mentions his love of jazz in Harlem as part of the inspiration for the entirety of Montage of a Dream Deferred. His love of jazz is further evidenced when, about a decade later in 1958, Hughes recited his verse accompanied by jazz musicians Charles Mingus and Phineas Newborn. In “Theme for English B” specifically, the title points to a connection between music and literature: themes. In music, a theme is a melody line that is the subject of a piece of music. This echoes the definition of a literary theme: a central idea or message in a piece of literature.
The speaker also mentions a jazz artist and jazz style when discussing the records he enjoys. “Bessie, bop” (Line 24) are included alongside “Bach” (Line 24), placing jazz on par with classical music in artistic merit. “Bessie” (Line 24) is Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, who sang famous songs such as “Down Hearted Blues” and “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” Be-bop, in the words of Hughes, “is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song” (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes). This musical style is mimicked in Hughes’s poetics.
The Character of Harlem
The speaker addresses and converses with Harlem, as if the borough were a character. In the fourth stanza, the text of the assignment, the speaker writes, “Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page” (Lines 18-19). The repetition aligns the speaker with Harlem. Harlem is repeatedly given a second-person pronoun, “you” (Lines 18-19), while the speaker refers to himself with the first-person pronoun, “me” (Line 19), characterizing them as having equal parts in the conversation. The speaker also, parenthetically, includes New York: “(I hear New York, too.)” (Line 20). However, New York as a whole, rather than its borough of Harlem, is not addressed in the second person and is only included as an aside.
Furthermore, the relationship between the speaker and Harlem mirrors the relationship between the speaker and his instructor. A few lines later, the instructor is given the second-person pronoun, “you” (Lines 30, 32, 34, 35, 37). The plural pronoun “we” is also moved from Harlem in Line 19 to the instructor in Line 36. Thematically, aligning Harlem with the instructor through the use of pronouns demonstrates that the Black community influences the speaker as much as his white instructor. He is in conversation with his predominantly Black neighborhood as well as the predominantly white academic institution he attends in an adjacent neighborhood. His writing is a combination of Black and white influences.
Related Titles
By Langston Hughes
