In 1951 Langston Hughes asks us "What happens to a dream deferred"? ... Langston Hughes wrote one poem and it was titled two different titles throughout his life, each title gives the poem a profoundly different reading. ... The questions Hughes is asking the reader make them think about their dreams they had and what happened to them, "Does [the dream] stink like rotten meant?"... It's as if Langston Hughes knows all these things are to come in the future. ... The title alone in this poem sets up your frame of mind for the rest of the poem. ...

• Word Count: 525
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

It can be caused by the imposition of certain rules and regulations forced upon a particular group of people, as was the case in both "Harlem (A Dream Deferred)" by Langston Hughes, and "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar. ... In "Harlem (A Dream Deferred)", the influential work of Langston Hughes written in 1951, the speaker dreams of civil rights, and equality. Although slavery was outlawed during the Civil War, nearly one hundred years before Hughes wrote this poem, blacks were still discriminated against by the whites simply because their skin was a different color. That feeling o...

• Word Count: 1067
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

Angelou read a lot as a child and admired African American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. She cites the last line of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy", which is "I know why the caged bird sings," for the title of her first autobiography (Bloom 2). However, the caged birds in the poem and the novel are slightly different. ... There is also a poem titled "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" that Angelou wrote after the novel. She arranged the story from a novel to a poem, and the theme was love and the universality of all lives (Bloom 167). ...

• Word Count: 536
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School