The poetry of one of the most celebrated African American poets, Langston Hughes, is largely informed by indignation and rejection of the racial injustice that characterized America in the time of the poet. As a living and intemperate witness to the social maladies of racial America, Hughes’ poetry, tied to the people and their conditions, could not but be inflected and influenced by the mood of anger and frustration, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance era and beyond.

Langston Hughes’ life was, for the most part, a typification of that abjection that the circumstances of racial discrimination and exploitation imposed on the African American. His style of poetry, in this vein, derives mainly from the actually lived experiences by the blacks, thus infusing in his art certain folk features, musical forms and speech patterns. But in his poetic ouvre, one of the most easily identifiable stylistic strategies used to explore the black condition is historical allusion. As Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (1994) note, for full appreciation of the poetry of Hughes and any other committed writer, a respect for, and understanding of, allusions are essential (5).