Selected Poems

The republic's promise held to account in verse. Let America Be America Again names the gap between the dream and the fact, then insists the dream is still worth claiming for those it has excluded. I, Too answers Whitman across the color line: I, too, sing America. Hughes made the franchise argument musical, which is to say unforgettable. (Confirm the public-domain status of each poem at build, as some of Hughes remains in copyright.)

The poet of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote the American promise and the American betrayal into the same lines. Let America Be America Again names the gap between the dream and the fact, and insists the dream is still worth claiming for those it has excluded. I, Too answers Whitman across the color line: I, too, sing America. He made the franchise argument in verse, and made it sing.