Category: Modern Poetry and Poetics

According to Langston Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (his answer to George Schuyler’s essay “Negro Art Hokum”), what is the “mountain” that stands in the way of “any true Negro art in America” ?

A. It is the racial discrimination endemic in the white community.
B. It is the racial segregation in the South.
C. It is a widespread “urge toward whiteness” among African Americans.
D. It is a widespread “urge to incorporate and neutralize other cultures” among white Americans.

In his first lecture onWilliam Butler Yeats, Professor Hammer says that the young Yeats identified with King Goll. What does he mean by this ?

A. Yeats’s poetry was autobiographical, but he understood his life through the prism of myths and symbols; symbolism was therefore present in both Yeats’s life and in his poetry.
B. Yeats believed that each person was an instance of a general cultural type or symbol.
C. The young Yeats wished to emphasize his identity as an English poet and draw attention away from his Irish heritage.
D. Both A and B