Online Lesson 2

The poem I chose today is
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Dreams
by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
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The reason why i chose this poem is because, every night, when people sleep, they dream. And in some cases "Dreams come true", so, I chose this poem as it tells us to treasure our dreams.

I chose this poet as he was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. He was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist.

He is intriguing as he worked various odd jobs in his adulthood, before serving a brief tenure as a crewman aboard the S.S. Malone in 1923, spending six months traveling to West Africa and Europe. In Europe, Hughes left the S.S. Malone for a temporary stay in Paris. In Paris, became part of the black expatriate community.

It was while working as a busboy, after being a personal assistant to the historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and leaving that post as he was not satisfied with its tight schedule, giving him time constrains that limited his writing, that Hughes would encounter the poet Vachel Lindsay. Impressed with the poems Hughes showed him, Lindsay publicised his discovery of a new black poet. By this time, Hughes' earlier work had already been published in magazines and was about to be collected into his first book of poetry.

The following year, Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University, an historically back university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. And then, he became a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, the first black fraternal organization founded at a historically black college and university.

Academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was a homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems. A primary biographer of Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African-American men in his work and life. This love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to a black male lover.

Despite all this, he still earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University in 1929. He was also inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Howard University.

After a brief research on his life, I can conclude that although he was not a perfect guy (as no one is perfect) he could still write famous and impressive poems, and thus can conclude that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses.

A few of Hughes' poems other than Dreams, would be :
The crisis, 1926
My people
Justice
If you'd like to see more of his works, you can visit this site: http://www.poemhunter.com/langston-hughes/poems/page-1/
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes
http://www.poemhunter.com/langston-hughes/poems/page-1/
http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16075