Harlem and Frederick Douglass Poem Comparrison

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A Bold Prediction (Poetry Paper Topic #10) Have you ever predicted the future? Sometimes, people have the ability to predict the events to come by piecing the clues of current life together. Even more impressive, sometimes people predict things solely by instinct, a gut feeling that just lingers and refuses to go away. It is safe to say that most people have had gut feelings that played out exactly as they have imagined. How does this work? Is it just coincidence? These are questions that may never be answered, but literature may aid one’s understanding of this philosophy. Fortunately for people, literature is a window into the past, preserving the many thoughts, feelings, and ideas of individual periods of time. In “Harlem” by Langston Hughes and “Fredrick Douglass” by Robert Hayden, it becomes obvious that Hughes and Hayden sensed an upcoming change in the civil-rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. By analyzing their current situations and understanding their wisdom and open-mindedness, it is clearly obvious why Hughes and Hayden must have felt strongly about their claims or implications of a great change to come. During the mid- twentieth century, blacks were on the mist of successfully obtaining their civil rights after being misled with false promises for so many years. Harlem is a very short poem, yet it manages to say so much about the many different feelings that the Negro culture had during this time. “What happen to a dream deferred” is how the poem opens (Hughes line 1). The dream Hughes speaks of is one of equality. He goes on to answer this question with a series of multiple other questions. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load (line 2-7). The raisin is the dream of equality.

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