blog 4

As I am writing this blog, I am hanging out at Randy's house. I had some trouble figuring out which poem I should discuss in my final blog for the third quarter. Randy told me to take a look at one of them he chose, "Let America Be America Again," and I decided that was way cooler than any other poem I would have found. So, I decided to take a look. I obviously read the whole poem, but the first stanza was what most stood out to me. The anaphora repeating the word "Let" is very powerful. I can almost picture a politician giving a moving speech with this  Langston Hughes really does not hold anything back here. He basically comes right out and says that the American Dream is dying. Hughes obviously still had some lasting feelings regarding slavery. Can we blame him though? He is proud of his culture and will do what he has to do in order to defend it. What Hughes really wanted was a fresh start and a new opportunity for people to achieve the American Dream for what was intended to be going back to the ideals and values of the pioneers and Founding Fathers. As a black man in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance, I can imagine Hughes felt very strongly about what he was writing. The oppression that black people endured just sixty years before then is disturbing to think about. This quote is still applicable today I believe. Sometimes I feel the American Dream is sorely misconstrued. Perhaps we could use that fresh start that Langston Hughes suggested in that poem in today's America. When he ends the stanza with, "Seeking a home where he himself is free," it makes me feel sympathetic for the narrator. It seems like the narrator does not feel the same sense of freedom that every American is entitled to by nature of being an American citizen.