Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s poem “Theme for English B.” Oh, how I love this poem! It packs so much into a short space. Published on its own in 1949, it was included in Langston Hughes’s 1951 collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. Though it gains more resonance when taken with the entire collection of Hughes’s bebop poetry, it also stands successfully on its own. In “Theme for English B,” Hughes imagines a 22-year-old black student—a transplant from North Carolina – living at the Harlem Y and going to college. He is the only “colored” student in his class at Columbia University, where Hughes himself had been a less-than-satisfied student in the 1920s. In the poem, Hughes plays with the idea of using writing – words on paper – as a tool to bridge racial, social, class, and educational differences. Through the “theme” the young man is writing, his professor – white and well educated – has the opportunity to learn from his black, yet-to-be-fully-“educated” student. Like so many other writing teache