Page 45 - Point 5 Literature Program Option 1 Teachers Guide (2) (1)

AS I GREW OLDER
langston Hughes

Student’s Coursebook, page 42

HOTS taught: Making connections
HOTS spiraled: Explaining patterns
Literary Term taught: Genre

Background Information

Biography
langston Hughes (1902–1967) was a famous african-american poet who lived during a
time of worldwide racial oppression against black people. growing up was a painful process,
in the course of which childhood dreams of ‘a place in the sun’ were shattered. Hughes was
involved in the civil rights movement led by dr. Martin luther King, Jr. and wrote protest
poetry. Hughes was also very much a part of the Harlem renaissance as one of the first poets

to promote african-american culture, such as jazz music, which he particularly loved for its
elements of free expression. Jazz rhythms are often echoed in the meter and repeated word
patterns of his poems.

Cultural issues

Until the end of the american Civil war (1865), in the southern states african-americans were
held as slaves. However, even after they were freed, they were not treated as equals. They could
not eat or study in the same places, or even sit next to a white person on the bus, and many
other restrictions. This went on until they began fighting for equal rights nearly one hundred
years later under the leadership of people like dr. Martin luther King, Jr. in the 1950s and
1960s. This means that when langston Hughes was in the north writing his poems and stories,
his fellow african-americans were still being heavily oppressed and discriminated against in
the south.

General Interpretation

langston Hughes was a Harlem renaissance writer, deeply concerned with racial pride and
with the creation of african-american poetry as an independent genre. He wrote jazz poetry in
the style of the jazz music he loved. Jazz originated in the United states as an african-american
version of european music, and therefore also symbolized the equality of white and black
people. It embraced rhythmic innovations which brought out the individuality of the performer.
Hughes incorporated these new rhythms into his work, and also the repetitive phrases of jazz
and blues music, another form rising out of the sufferings of slavery.
echoing the free and individual expressiveness of jazz, As I Grew Older is written all in one
stanza, in free verse, with irregular line lengths and no specific rhyme scheme. simple diction

makes each word important and the themes clear, and repetition creates movement, producing
lyric and even hypnotic or trance-like tones (I have almost forgotten my dream … My dream.) The

as I grew older 45