Extract

I, too, sing America.

A piano player on Lenox Avenue rocks back and forth on a rickety stool and plays a tune from somewhere deeper than memory, a sound that is both sorrow and the survival of sorrow, and a young poet listening in the smoky room transcribes the rhythm into a new kind of verse. Langston Hughes published this debut collection in 1926, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and its poems marry blues and jazz cadences to American lyric poetry with a naturalness that conceals enormous craft. Hughes writes of rivers and dream-deferral, of Harlem rooftops and the collective ache of a people whose beauty the nation refused to see. The music in these pages does not decorate the meaning. It is the meaning, carried in every syncopated line.