Is Langston Hughes a Modernist poet? That question, once handed to me in a college classroom, now strikes me as too small for the man who so clearly saw poetry as a public force. Labels like “Modernist” tend to flatten voices into movements. But Hughes resists neat categorization. Yes, he wrote in free verse. Indeed, he engaged themes of alienation, dislocation, and power. But unlike many of his Modernist contemporaries, Hughes wasn’t retreating into uncertainty—he was declaring something bold: I, too, am America.

If the Modernist tradition is marked by fragmentation, skepticism, and the search for identity in a fractured world, Hughes repurposed it. He didn’t merely inhabit Modernism—he redirected its energy. His work uses the tools of the movement not to indulge in disillusionment, but to demand inclusion.

I, Too: Assertion Through Simplicity

In “I, Too,” Hughes crafts a speaker who is both excluded and resolute. “They send me to eat in the kitchen / when company comes,” he writes—capturing the material reality of segregation in language plain enough to punch. But this poem does not dwell in grievance. It rises.

“Tomorrow, / I’ll be at the table / when company comes.”

The clarity of this future tense is part of what gives the poem its rhetorical force. Unlike the dense ambiguity favored by many Modernists, Hughes writes in a tone both prophetic and familiar. There’s no mystery in what he’s saying. It’s powerful in how undeniable it is.

“Besides, / They’ll see how beautiful I am / and be ashamed.”

This is not a poem of passive suffering. It’s a quiet revolution in seven stanzas. By ending with “I, too, am America,” Hughes echoes Whitman, but not as mimicry, and instead as reclamation. If Whitman’s “Song of Myself” explodes with democratic optimism, Hughes’ reply narrows the lens: democracy unfulfilled is democracy unreal. The poem insists not just on presence, but on poetic belonging.

Democracy: Urgency Without Ornament

Where “I, Too” whispers with steel, “Democracy” speaks with a raised voice. Hughes refuses delay:

“I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. / I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.”

The language is stripped down, free of abstraction, and rhythmically taut. Hughes’ Modernism, if we call it that, is defined by urgency. He does not write to obscure meaning; he’s writing to remove every excuse not to see it.

His voice is inclusive but unflinching. Though the poem centers African-American experience, its logic applies to anyone denied freedom. In this way, Hughes crafts a new kind of Modernist document: one not about inner turmoil, but about national failure.

Hughes vs. Modernism—Or Hughes as Its Correction?

What makes Hughes remarkable is that he uses poetic form not to explore disillusionment, but to counter it. In his world, fragmentation is not a symptom of malaise—it’s the lived condition of racial inequality. Unlike Eliot or Pound, Hughes does not despair over the fall of old myths. He points to the myth of equality and calls its bluff.

Hughes reveals how “high” literary movements often erase the voices of those who live history rather than theorize it. He critiques both society and the gatekeeping tendencies of poetry itself. His work exemplifies rhetoric-as-resistance. The simplicity of his phrasing is far from naïve—it’s strategic. His poetry is persuasive by design.

He also diverges aesthetically. While many Modernists indulged in density and obscurity, Hughes practiced rhetorical clarity. His poetic plainness isn’t a lack of sophistication; he weaponizes it. His audience, often white and educated, could not hide behind metaphor.

Hughes expands what beauty can look like in poetry. He doesn’t discard music or rhythm, but just doesn’t let them soften the truth. His poems are built on belief in a democratic ideal not yet realized. They are political not because they propose a system, but because they demand accountability.

A Different Kind of Modernist Poet

Langston Hughes may not fit every formal trait of Modernism, but he embodies its deepest question: What does it mean to be human in a fractured world? His answer is both radical and intimate: it means demanding to be seen.

Where others dissected disillusionment, Hughes crafted clarity. Where others retreated into abstraction, he stood in the light of lived experience and called it poetry. And in doing so, he didn’t just join the Modernist movement; he redefined its center.

~ Amelia Desertsong