The importance of tradition to Langston Hughes

    The element of tradition is apparent In Langston Hughes’s and Countee Cullen‘s poetry in these poems’ “Situation” and “Mother to “Son “Incident,” “Heritage”:  in addition, all of these poems relate to Eliot’s theory of poetry in "Tradition and the Individual Talent in different ways. The fundamental principles of tradition in T.S. Eliot’s theory are still in their own poetry. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen’s use tradition in their poetry as a symbol to their own life’s significance.   This is unlike T.S. Eliot’s theory where he emphasizes the importance of tradition in poetry as a living object and a sense of time not his own life experiences, a sense of identity. In their poetry Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, both have a unique sense of tradition as an element with more of a regard to their own life experiences, a sense of identity in their poems because they both lived through Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen's poetry makes scant reference–implicit or explicit–to the Western literary tradition, but they instead urge readers to turn “outside” the text, allowing the poem to become a product of its time and social conditions.

Eliot’s emphasis on tradition and de-contextualization are inadequate for understanding the work of a poet like Langston Hughes, one of Eliot’s contemporaries. To truly understand a poem like Hughes’ “Situation,” one needs no extensive knowledge of the Western tradition in literature. Rather, an understanding of the socioeconomic and historical contexts of the poem’s production proves critical for full appreciation.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot argues that the writer’s and readers’ knowledge of the Western tradition shapes both the poem in the creation and its ability to be understood by the audience. While certain knowledge of the Western tradition may help a reader to appreciate Eliot’s work, this need not be a requirement for robustly reading poems that differ from his own in terms of structure and content. Eliot first challenges the idea that tradition is typically underplayed in British writing. As he puts this: “We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors. . . .[yet] we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets. . .assert their immortality most vigorously. Here, Eliot first defines tradition as the broad spectrum of literary history that influenced the writer. He believes that the individual elements of poetry for which the poet is most commonly praised are actually mere extensions of the poets who came before him. Thus, for Eliot, this aversion to tradition is, in effect, hypocritical.(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237868). 

Eliot sacrifices the notion of individual inspiration, which he would come to consider simply another layer of mortar atop an already solid foundation. Eliot is aware of the wide spectrum of tradition which came before. Langston Hughes’s poetry makes scant reference–implicit or explicit–to the Western literary tradition, but instead urges readers to turn “outside” the text, allowing the poem to become a product of its time and social conditions. Hughes was situated within the Harlem Renaissance, a time of cultural revival for African-Americans. Using Harlem’s gritty socioeconomics for inspiration, many artists of the Harlem Renaissance deployed their artistic and literary talents as vital political statements (T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”).. It is doubtful that a poem like “Situation” can be fully appreciated without some knowledge of the context of its production: “When I rolled three 7′s/in a row/I was scared to walk out/with the dough” The poem’s seventeen words contain no allusions to the Western aesthetic tradition. They neither speak of “great works,” nor hold within them some immortal link to poetry’s past. Hughes’ narrator is best understood by what I term “situated analysis” of the text. That is, one must literally situate the poem within its socio-economic and historical context in order to understand the work. The poem’s overall image is fairly straightforward, and certainly could be gleaned from the text alone. Without a socio-cultural context, a reader could discern that the narrator is rolling dice, but without situational context, could a reader adequately comprehend the speaker’s fear to “walkout/with the dough”? Eliot’s made a claim that “When the poem has been made, something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before.” (Eliot, “Frontiers,” 14.)) Yet, can a reader experience the full impact of the speaker’s fear without also holding a deep understanding of urban life or of American racism? Without situating one’s analysis within (or even against) the context of white privilege as a lived event for blacks, can the political force of the poem by feel? Situated, the speaker’s “luck” simply means that the speaker now possesses “dough” that everyone else wants, and there is nothing to stop others from taking it from him. The situated analysis helps us to glimpse a part of the African-American psyche of the early twentieth century whereby distinctions between “good luck” and “bad luck” blur. The speaker’s good luck makes him a target, not a winner, a victim in a social game understood as a lived event outside the confines of the text itself.

Ultimately, Eliot’s critical advice provides methods for understanding and interpreting his own poetry, as he would like it to be interpreted and valued. His principles aren’t adequate for interpreting work which relies of extra-textual contexts for its full meaning. In the case of Hughes’ “Situation,” extra-textual knowledge enhances rather than spoils its message. Within the frame of certain Modernist precepts, Eliot’s interpretive anchor holds a reminder that context and situation can matter most. (T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”).

In the poem Hughes uses the device of an extended metaphor to describe the life of the mother. The extended metaphor compares the mother’s life to a staircase.  The line “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” begins and ends the poem. With this line, Hughes quickly establishes for the reader that the speaker in the poem has not had an easy life.  The concept of a crystal staircase gives the reader the impression of complete opulence. Who might be the type of person whose life is compared to a crystal staircase? The reader can indulge in inferring that it would be someone with supreme wealth and someone who did not have to work as hard as the speaker did. By using the imagery of a crystal staircase as the opposite of her staircase, the reader immediately knows before learning any of the details of her staircase that she has not had an easy life.

Hughes then goes on to illustrate the staircase of life that the speaker has lived. The speaker’s staircase has splinters and tacks. Both of these would be symbolic of the mother having suffered many hurts. A splinter or a tack will not cause life-threatening injury, but they certainly will cause pain. If the splinters and tacks are on every step along the way, it is symbolic that her life has always had pain.

Another descriptive detail of the mother’s staircase is that of boards being torn up. If a person walks on a staircase in which boards are missing, it gives the symbolic value that the mother’s life was filled with more dangerous situations than just tacks and splinters. It is symbolic that the mother has had gaping holes in her life that she had to somehow step over to arrive at the place in life that she is now. Not every step along the way was a safe one, but despite this, she perseveres.

After describing the staircase of the mother, Hughes has the speaker address the son by saying that he should not sit down or fall down just because his staircase is hard to climb. In the mother’s eyes, the son should never give up. Instead, he should see her as an example because it wasn’t easy for her, but she never gave up. With the extended metaphor of a staircase as a symbol of the steps one takes in life, one can infer that as long as a person is living, there will be more steps to climb. It is like a precursor to the concept of the popular modern song lyric “stairway to heaven”. The mother is symbolically climbing the stairway to heaven and the path to heaven is not always an easy journey. The mother wants the son to know that heaven is worth working toward by taking life one step at a time, even if the stairs are full of tacks and splinters. Countee Cullen was a 20th-century poet who became known as a lesser contributor to the Harlem Renaissance.  Cullen believed that having the qualifier "African-American" before the poet was itself a reflection on the state of racial relations in America. He did not want to be known as a one-dimensional writer. Despite this desire "Incident" is a reflection on youth and bigotry that became one of his most well-known contributions.

The young speaker is riding on a public bus while happily taking in the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar city. At some point, he is greeted by stares from another child. The speaker believes there is little difference between them because of the closeness of the two’s size and age.  The black child smiles since he sees the only distinction is due to location, the white boy is a “Baltimorean”. This gap can easily be bridged. The white child’s slur makes the speaker aware of how much larger the differences really are between them. His one-word epithet makes the other understand the nature of black identity for the first time. Racial harmony now seems impossible due to the white child’s contempt and the black child’s feelings of otherness. The myth of their friendship, present in the glee of the speaker just a few lines earlier, has been shattered by racism. The experience of growing up African-American, spending years passing from childhood naiveté of race relations to ultimate resignation, happens in an instant within Cullen’s quatrains. Heritage is a poem with a very deep meaning behind it. Countee Cullen is an African-American writer. During the 1920's African-Americans were faced with many problems in writing. They were challenged with whether they should write in the traditional art form or create new forms that came from Black experiences or write similar to the way Americans wrote or write about global issues. Countee Cullen experienced these issues in his long poem Heritage, the feeling of what being an African-American in America is like. In the first stanza, Cullen describes what his home country means to him. The poem starts "What is Africa to me:" The following lines are describing what Africa means to him. Up to the fifth stanza, Cullen describes what Africa means and what it is. From the fifth stanza until the end Cullen takes a turn. In the last section of the poem, Cullen describes what is life is like in the world he is living in now. In lines ninety-nine and one hundred, he says "Must my heart grow sick and falter,/ Wishing He I served were Black,". These lines give the impression that Cullen is unhappy where he is now and wishes that his life were different. It also suggests the cruelty that is felt by African-Americans. This is shown in line one hundred “Wishing He I served were Black." Heritage “is a poem of very strong emotions and feelings. During the time period in which “Heritage “is written, the separation between African-Americans and Americans is very strong. This separation is clearly shown throughout Countee Cullen's long poem Heritage.

 In their poetry Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, both have a unique sense of tradition as an element with more of a regard to their own life experiences, a sense of identity in their poems because they both lived through Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen’s poetry makes scant reference–implicit or explicit–to the Western literary tradition, but they instead urge readers to turn “outside” the text, allowing the poem to become a product of its time and social conditions. People do need to have a background in a Western literary tradition in order to understand Langston Hughes’s and Countee Cullen’s poetry. 

Works Cited

Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land and Other Writings. (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 3. [↩]Eliot, “Love Song,” 4. [↩]

Langston Hughes, “Situation,” Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, (New York: Vintage, 1987), 235. [↩]

    T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Waste Land and Other Writings. (New York: Modern Library, 2002):100. [↩]Eliot, “Tradition,” 100. [↩]

.T.S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” The Sewanee Review 64 no. 4 (1956): 13. [↩].    Eliot, “Love Song,” 4. [↩]