Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.

Vol. 1, Poems (1921-1940); Vol. 2, Poems (1941-1950); Vol. 3, Poems (1951-1967) Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001. $29.95 each.

These volumes of the work of Langston Hughes are the first three of a projected eighteen which, as the dust-jacket tells us, "are to be published with the same goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people." The publication of these three volumes reflects the long sustained effort of their general editor, Arnold Rampersad, to represent Langston Hughes to a new, contemporary audience. Hughes has had an audience of significance since the publication in 1921 of his first poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in a national journal, Crisis, the national organ of the NAACP, but that audience was largely a popular audience, and though many (of the few) African American academicians were probably part of it, few academicians knew how to (or were inclined to) talk about Hughes in a literary way. Hughes's "new contemporary audience" is an audience composed not only of hundreds of African Americans--some educated and cultured, most not--who recognize Hughes as someone who speaks for African Americans and someone whose work and career formed a basis for pride, but also of college literature majors, black and white, taught by literary specialists, black and white--a highly educated, sophisticated, professional group of readers.

Langston Hughes probably read during the course of his career for more audiences than most contemporary poets, more listeners than heard T. S. Eliot, certainly more than Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, and, I would argue, Robert Frost. One might imagine that Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, those extraordinarily popular public readers of verse, might have read to more people than Hughes, but I don't think so. Hughes read in public for far more years than they. I think of the audience that I stood before when I introduced Langston Hughes at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1967, shortly before his death, an audience of 350 people who were not students or professionals but middle- and working-class non-academics who came to hear a writer whose work was meaningful to them. Other poets at that time were reading only to students at colleges and universities. I can't think of a single poet who was reading to such audiences as Hughes was. The poet W. D. Snodgrass, for example, read his poetry widely, but his audiences were not of the character of Hughes's. Rampersad has intended to bridge the gaps among these audiences and at the same time to fulfill Hughes's desire, apparently his own as well, "to make his books available to the people."

Rampersad, with his brilliant, award-winning two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, The Life of Langston Hughes, followed by his publication (with David Roessel) of The Complete Poems of Langston Hughes, and now with The Collected Works, continues his sustained effort to raise the level of perception of and hence conversation about Hughes's work and to show us what Hughes is all about, what is good and worthwhile about his work, and how we might continue to talk about it.

Each of the volumes in the series (containing novels, autobiography, short stories, drama, translation, radio and television scripts, etc.) will have an introduction by its editor. What Rampersad has done in the first three introductions is to show how the works contained within each volume relate to the general outlines of Hughes's life. The attention of the reader moves seamlessly back and forth, and the astute reader is given a sound measure against which to compare his own reading. These introductions are conceived in such a way as to move dynamically through their materials. Hence, there is overlapping of the introductions, suggesting that the periods covered by each of the three volumes do not exist independently of each other. This is especially important in view of the fact that in the publication and republication of his own work Hughes, for interesting and sometimes complicated reasons, paid no attention to the chronology of his work--a great problem for readers and researchers because prior to the work of Rampersad it was nearly impossible to know the order in which Hughes's poems (to say nothing of the other works) had been written. It was a royal pain partly because Hughes sometimes consciously wanted to obscure or diminish the significance of his political past and partly because he did not clearly distinguish (in my opinion) among periods of his past.

Readers of this review will also want to know that within these three volumes Hughes's poems are presented volume by volume as they were published during his career. Since this is a far more complicated matter than might appear and than I have space to explain, see "A Note on the Text," appearing in each volume.

Hughes could not have imagined that his work would reach the people in this particular form. It does great credit to the University of Missouri Press and to his birth state that things would have progressed to such a point that he would be so honored as to have his complete works published under its auspices. But of course most people will not have this collected edition of Hughes's poems in their living rooms (or libraries, or studies). Most readers will probably not go to libraries to read Hughes's complete works. But it will be there. And in this form, as The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, it will find its way to the people and to even more people than Langston Hughes could possibly have imagined. The people who will bring Hughes's work to the public will do so through this version of it. It will be the primary medium of intercession between Langston Hughes and the world for a long, long time.

Donald B. Gibson

Rutgers University