I, Too is a famous poem written by Langston Hughes. Throughout the poem, the speaker doesn’t reveal his profession. There was a reason why Langston Hughes left out the speaker’s career, and only mentioned his color. I believe Langston did an excellent job with this but, and inspired his readers to look to the future where segregation is no longer an issue. Writing from the common black man’s perspective affected the white and black communities equally.
The poem begins with the speaker sitting at his desk and holding a pen in his hand: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (1-2). A pen is a tool of a writer and Heaney shows the choice of his profession. And in his hand the pen feels like a gun. He feels very confident that he is very skilled with the pen as well as with a gun. The father of the speaker is digging outside: “Under my window, a clean rasping sound / When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: / my father digging” (3-5).
Due to a lack of formal writing instruction he was a self-taught writer (Gerber 115). This made his writing genius even more awe-inspiring. Outside of college he worked as a surveyor of the Salem Custom House (“Nathaniel Hawthorne Author (1804-1864)”). He enjoyed this job which was an escape from his other duties. Because of his youthful love for reading and dislike for business Hawthorne wanted to become a writer long before he later decided to study it at Bowdoin (Marks 1611-1612).
Hughes wrote this brief poem in fifteen minutes in July, 1920, while crossing the Mississippi on a train ride to visit his father in Mexico. The poem connects four great rivers in the Middle East, Africa, and America. His purpose was to show the movement of the Negro through time. One of the hallmarks of his poetry is the ability of writing a small, brief poem and still have multiple meanings behind it. It wasn 't always what hughes has written for us in his poetry, but what we take away from the poem.
Cullen wrote a poem called For a Poet. The poem is about how Cullen has treated his dreams. The poems by Hughes and Cullen discuss similarities in dreams, but they are different in the way they are written, how they should be spoken and the emotion that is produced by them. The way in which each of the writers, Hughes and Cullen, write has differences and similarities. Hughes writes his poem I, Too in an aggressive way.
Heaney describes his father as having ‘globed’ shoulders that are like a ‘full sail’. This tells the reader that in Heaney’s eyes his father is literally larger than life and therefore implies his admiration. This imagery also adds to the maritime theme and creates a sense of power for Heaney’s father. Heaney also describes the horses his father is controlling to be straining at the ‘clicking tongue’ which is an example of onomatopoeia. His father is also ‘mapping the furrow exactly’.
Countee Cullen was another popular person of the Negro renaissance Cullen was born in New York City he also educated in the New York schools. Cullen received the Harmon gold award after publishing his first collection of poems. He became an assistant editor of “Opportunity “.Which was an important medium of expressions for the negro writers of Harlem renaissances Cullen also wrote stories for children. Yet do I marvel “I doubt not god is good well-meaning kind” in this poem it showed that they believed in god throughout the times of suffering mostly African Americans. Cullen felt divided in between being black and poet.
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the writers who wrote about slavery. Some of his literary works were about slavery. Eventhough, he was not specifically writes about slavery, but he wrote it using metaphor or indirect speech. He could write about it because he lives in Richmond, Virginia, which is having many free blacks to slave. Because he seemed very familiar with slavery and maybe ever saw one or some incidents which related to slavery, he really aware about slavery issue in his town and also his country.Slavery happened in the African-American people.
Coupled with switching his major and not getting his degree, Tolstoy had dropped out of Kazan University, he began to put his time into farming, as his father had done. In contrast to his father, Tolstoy also recorded entries in a diary type book. Which he would continue throughout his whole life. In 1848 Tolstoy joined his brother in the Russian Army, which was a base for his early pieces of writing. By looking at the the stories that Tolstoy wrote during the war you are able to see how the war influenced his writing in the following ways: (1) comparing his life while he’s in the war to his life outside of the war; (2) battling in the Crimean War, and (3) his interaction with the other
Great writing can come from a far range of time periods, some of which were marked by accepted racism and sexism. This doesn’t change how well the piece is written, but it does change what can be taught through the piece. For instance, look at Mark Twain. He lived in a time before women could vote and before the civil rights movement changed interracial interaction. If a teacher tried to use Twain’s novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to teach their students values today, it would be hard to divorce Twain’s controversial views from his non controversial views.