The poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes is highly controversial and concerns many arguable subjects. One of those subjects is the American Dream, and Hughes says it has changed (191). The author hopes the American Dream will one day become what it once was. Hughes also states the following: “America was never America to me” (191). Saying so, he means that America was never what he wanted it to be. The country that the author lives in does not correspond to the America of its citizens’ dreams. One might say that Hughes speaks in the voice of oppressed American citizens such as farmers, workers, black people, immigrants. This poem is an example of American realism, which describes a current view of what is happening (Tadjibayev et al. 146). The author of the poem describes America’s flaws and seeks redemption for his country, invoking the American Dream as a paradigm.
Works Cited
Hughes, Langston, et al. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Books, 1994.
Tadjibayev, Musajon et al. “The Development of Realism in American Literature”. European Journal of Research and Reflection in Educational Sciences, vol. 8, no. 10, 2020, pp. 145-150.