INTRODUCTION

In an essay published six years before his death, Langston Hughes described his formative first encounter with modern American poetry at Central High School in Cleveland. “We read Sandburg, Millay, Masters, and other American poets who wrote of the things we knew about,” Hughes said,

It is well known that Hughes's poetics follows a line of development in twentieth-century American poetry that Pound denounced for its “general floppiness” – a line that extends from Whitman to Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, E. A. Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Lowell. Whitman would always be, for Hughes, “the greatest of American poets”; and, as early as 1927, he explicitly distanced himself, and all the other writers in Alain Locke's New Negro anthology, from Poe as the forerunner of Eliot's modernist craft.