Harlem Renaissance.
The prose and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance was not as optimistic as the art movement of the same period. The writing of the period was usually very political. Much of it was talking about the bad conditions in which the blacks had to live in and all of the oppression they had to put with. In Countee Cullen's Incident, he is recalling an incident in Baltimore when he was called a racial term. Langston Hughes's Dream Deferred is about the dream of all African Americans, equality. The poem isn't optimistic, but is more of a prophecy of things to come.
Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay all influenced me as an aspiring writer. Countee Cullen didn't always write political poems or prose. He varied his topics, and wrote in a different style than most of the poets of his day. Many of his contemporaries criticized him because of it. Langston Hughes always remembered his heritage. Many of his poems were on this topic. Hughes knew that if he forgot his heritage he would never achieve his goal of equality for the Negro race. Claude McKay knew that his writing would have an effect on the world. McKay used his writing to point out the bad condition in which the Negroes had to live. Through his writing, McKay, and other writers of the period including Langston Hughes, was able to make people aware of the harassment that Negroes had to deal with on a daily basis.
