This study attempts to examine the procedure in which Langston Hughes combined his poetry with the vernacular music for poetic embodiment of the blues and jazz, or more specifically, ‘boogie-woogie’―a style of piano blues, and ‘bebop’―a modernist movement in jazz. With that aim, this thesis analyzes boogie-woogie poems and bebop poems from Montage of a Dream Deferred(1951), one of his volumes of collected poems professing to be “musical” in particular. Hughes’s music poems are differentiated from most of the other music poems. While the others tend to just employ musical elements partially or imitate musical images superficially, Hughes’s works try to embody not only the structure and subject of his people’s music, but also its process of evolutionary transition. Boogie-woogie poems and bebop poems from Montage show the process of shift from the blues to diverse “lower genres” of jazz. Montage is carefully orchestrated as one continuous poem employing the technique of montage. The theme of “the dream deferred” is carried in the musical motifs. The boogie-woogie rumble of walking bass touches the bottom of the emotions, and nonsense bebop syllables or scat singing represents uneasy state of mind from constant reversals and contrasts. Here music as structure and metaphor helps hold the poem together and drive it to the end, creating continuity in depth. In this sense, Montage can be said to be “one long interrelated poetic jam session.”
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