As a body of work, the poetry of Langston Hughes presents a
vision of how members of a political community should comport
themselves, particularly when politics yield few tangible solutions to
their problems. Confronted with human degradation and bitter
disappointment, the best course of action may be to abide by the
ethics of a melancholy citizenship. A mournful disposition is
associated with four democratic virtues: candor, pensiveness,
fortitude, and self-abnegation. Together, these four characteristics
lead us away from democratic heartbreak and toward political
renewal. Hughes’s war-themed poems offer a richly layered example
of melancholy citizenry in action. They reveal how the fight for
liberty can be leveraged for the ends of equality. When we analyze
the artist’s reworking of Franklin Roosevelt’s orations in the pursuit
of racial justice, we learn that writing poetry can be an exercise in
popular constitutionalism.
