Introduction to Literature (Course Guide / Andy Skemp)

Use the Credo Reference to learn more about individual poets and authors, as wells literary terms and ideas. A great place to look for information when you're feeling confused about something. The articles are mostly short and easy to read.
Harlem Renaissance - Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Database: Credo Reference.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play...

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins...

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother..

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem.

I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall...

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot...

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears...

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth...

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent...

Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities.