Langston Hughes and McKay

There are many things that are different between the two poets. The first is that Claude McKay has a specific style of writing that he uses in a majority of the poems we read. This style is a sonnet. He does this because it makes the people see that these African Americans aren’t all uneducated like the whites thought they were, but instead they are writing poems in the same style as the famous Shakespeare. Langston Hughes incorporates many different styles of writing in his poems. They are similar in the topics they discuss. Both Langston and McKay make connections between the white and black race. They both have a sort of bitterness about them when it comes to the white race. For example, in “To My White Friends,” McKay talks about how black people can be just as awful to white people as whites are to black people, but they are choosing to be better people than that, and not succumb to the savagery that the whites have become. In Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B,” Hughes writes about how he wants to be a separate person from the whites. He realizes that he doesn’t want to be a part of the whites, and the whites don’t want to be a part of a black man, but Hughes realizes that that is a part of being in America. Also, both poets write about Africa. Langston Hughes mentions it in his poem, “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and McKay speaks of it in “Africa.” They also each have a poem discussing individuals and the actions they are doing because of the opportunities they are given, or I guess not given.