http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/hughes.htm
Of all the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes went furthest in identifying and incorporating the idiomatic speech of the Negro people of his time, unquestionably raising it to the level of high art. His work (which includes volumes of fiction as well as poetry) provides the voice of Harlem in an unprocessed vernacular, in many ways looking back (a lá Sankofa) to the dialect tradition of Dunbar . His poems tend toward communal expressions of strength, sorrow, loss and hope; just like many of the spirituals. He understood the spirituals as a gift from his ancestors, and in his poems reflect his appreciation of their creators. Indeed, as one of the primary proponents of African American vernacular speech as a poetic vehicle, Hughes would write directly on their enduring influence in his poem "Spirituals." In it Hughes acknowledges the continuing functionality of the music over one hundred years after it was created:
Rocks and the firm roots of trees.
The rising shafts of mountains.
Something strong to put my hands on.
Sing, O Lord Jesus!
Song is a strong thing.
I heard my mother singing
When life hurt her:
Gonna ride in my chariot some day!
The branches rise
From the firm roots of trees.
The mountains rise
From the solid lap of earth.
The waves rise
From the dead weight of sea.
Sing, O black mother!
Song is a strong thing.
Hughes, more than any other African American poet of his time, reflects the griot tradition in the way that he musically records and reports the lives of his people. He also preserves the continuity of his clan's heritage by creating poems that reads like praise-songs. As a maker of verse, Hughes embodies Sankofa, returning to the experience of the spirituals, and offering these nuggets of wisdom from the past to mitigate the present.
Poets like Dunbar, Johnson, Cullen, McKay and Hughes were the early designers of a uniquely African American aesthetic, even though they were viewed as exotic oddities, not representative of the "average colored man." Yet they were average - average in the sense that they continued the African practice of forming poetry from their immediate surroundings; average in that they used that poetry to comment on and mold the world around them; average in that they carried forward the collective memories of their people.