From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.POEMS OF FIVE DECADES The Negro Speaks of Rivers Aunt Sue’s Stories Negro Danse Africaine Song for a Banjo Dance Mother to Son When Sue Wears Red Jazzonia Prayer Meeting My People Migration Lament for Dark Peoples Youth Dream Variations Johannesburg Mines Negro Dancers I, Too The Weary Blues To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s Soledad Cross Summer Night Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret Midwinter Blues Ma Man Lament over Love Homesick Blues Ruby Brown Elevator Boy Bound No’th Blues Feet o’ Jesus Beale Street Love A House in Taos Railroad Avenue Saturday Night Midnight Dancer Blues Fantasy Lenox Avenue: Midnight Spirituals Fire Moan Angels Wings Baby Red Silk Stockings Young Gal’s Blues Magnolia Flowers Hurt Aesthete in Harlem Afro-American Fragment Black Seed To Certain Negro Leaders October 16: The Raid Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria Florida Road Workers Always the Same Letter to the Academy Personal Cubes Madrid Let America Be America Again Genius Child Poet to Patron Visitors to the Black Belt Note on Commercial Theatre Seven Moments of Love Daybreak in Alabama Evenin’ Air Blues Sunset in Dixie Me and the Mule Merry-Go-Round Ku Klux Reverie on the Harlem River Words Like Freedom Red Cross Silhouette Still Here Moonlight in Valencia: Civil War Madam’s Past History Madam’s Calling Cards Madamlƒf