Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...
Free Verse, Irregular Meter
Free, free, free! Six questions and one very meek declarative sentence compose the bones of this poem – it's a poem built of questions, and que...Our speaker is like a really cool professor who is super smart and who asks the best questions. We imagine him standing in front of a classroom, letting the chatter and nervous energy die down. He...
There's a tinge of Jeopardy to this poem (thanks to the six questions), and there's a healthy dose of the Blues (thanks to all of the dream talk, the straight talk, and the soul-searching). When we...
Hold onto your hats. This poem actually has two titles. Hughes first titled it "Harlem," but later called it "Dream Deferred." Some people even refer to it by its first line, "what happens to a dre...
Harlem, Dreams, Dialect, Blues and Jazz
As the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was passionate about exploring the soul and condition of the black commun...(3) Base Camp
The questions of this poem lead us to some weighty issues lurking at its heart, but we're willing to bet you have experience with the idea of deferred dreams, and...While this poem's setting is ambiguous, it contains very specific images that ignite our imaginations. We can imagine our speaker is a professor in a college classroom (see the "Speaker Point of Vi...
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