O'Hara & Hughes

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Jina Moon Professor Tronrud English 165W 12/10/13 “I, Too, Literally”: Langston Hughes’s “I, Too” and Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria” One of the issues that are not hard to face is racial discrimination in the past and present. Both Langston Hughes and Frank O'Hara lived in generations where they had to deal with racial discrimination and criticizing against each other in general. "I, Too" by Langston Hughes and "Autobiographia Literaria" by Frank O'Hara both talk about how each of them being discriminated against by the society that they are a part of. In "I, Too" by Langston Hughes, the speaker talks about how he is different from others that he is around. In "Autobiographia Literaria" by Frank O'Hara, the speaker talks about how he spends his childhood all alone. Both poems have the speakers that are in conflict with others around them because they are different. Although both Hughes's and O'Hara's poems talk about each of the speakers’ personal experiences, the general ideas that they convey are different. Hughes uses foreshadowing to show the speaker’s boldness within the racial discrimination and O'Hara uses authorial intrusion to show the speaker’s distance with people. Hughes's foreshadowing indicates the speaker’s optimistic future that is planned for himself, while O'Hara's authorial intrusion shows the speaker’s struggles and his position in the poem intensively to get understandings from the readers. In "I, Too" by Langston Hughes, the speaker feels discriminated by the people around him because of the difference in behavior of others towards him. Since the speaker of the poem is African-American and others around him are not, he has to deal with the racial discriminations and the injustices from the society that he is in. From the lines 1-2, "I, too, sing America. / I am the darker brother," we can tell that he is different from
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