Jazz Poetry

Besides poetry Langston Hughes had also always been a fan of Jazz and Blues music. He was captivated by the sound of it. He stated that “ jazz to [him] is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America”. To Hughes Jazz and Blues music are  “uniquely African American art forms”. Through my research on Langston Hughes, I found out that he was the first true Jazz poet and kind of created jazz poetry.  From the beginning Hughes brought his love of music to the page and created a combination between jazz and poetry called jazz poetry. Jazz poetry is poetry that imitates jazz music with its rhythms, repetitive phrases, sounds and style or poetry that has jazz as its main focus. Hughes was a major influence during the Harlem Renaissance. One of the reasons he was such a major influence was because he made jazz poetry into a “uniquely African American literary form, distinctive among the venerable- and very white-poetic canon”. When writing jazz poetry “Hughes often incorporated syncopated rhythms, jive language, or looser phrasing to mimic the improvisation nature of jazz”. To clarify, jive language is simply “Negro-Slang” from the Harlem Renaissance. Some of Langston Hughes’s jazz poems included “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “The Weary Blues”.Jazz poetry was a new form of poetry that let Hughes’s poems share the stories and meanings about African American culture in a more musical way.