Just about a week ago, we began our reading and analysis on a collection of Langston Hughes’ poems Montage of a Dream Deferred. I read it and could not see the relationship between all the poems. The only exception was with the poem “Warning” and “Warning: Augmented,” which seems very much obvious. I hadn’t a clue what to look for, everything seemed so scattered. However, when a cinematic montage was introduced, I went back to the collection of poems and reread it to try to see if there was some kind of chronological order that would provide the same effects of a cinematic montage. I rather liked that the concept of a cinematic montage of brought up. I’ve watched many movies and never really noticed the common use of a montage. I never thought much of those scenes and its significance, just knowing that progress for the character being depicted was made and the passage of time was occurring. It’s funny how cinematic montage was brought up in relation to literature.

During my reread of Hughes’ collection, I kept in mind the montage that I was looking for and tried to make connections. I am not sure whether I was purposely making up those connections to a montage because that was what I was looking for, but I began to notice it. I felt as if these poems were about a single person’s experience, even though there are more than one voice in quite a few of the poems. It seems to follow a person’s life. We discussed in class about the Harlem Renaissance of roughly the 1920s. That was the time period, if I recall correctly, known as the Progressive Era? Things were beginning to change and an important topic was equality. Montage of a Dream Deferred starts off with probably a description of the move up North after the American Civil War. As I continued to read the poems, I noticed that many topics were in some kind of order; I thought perhaps modeling after the events of the Progressive era. The poems then lead up to the final poems “World War II.” It made a little bit more sense in thinking about the montage in this collection of poems, but I still have doubts.

Because I was still a bit doubtful of my conclusion, I thought there would be a possibility of the montage applied to just the individual poems. “Deferred” was the specific poem I looked to, in order to find the montage effect. This poem did indeed, elicit a sort of scene-after-scene effect of different people’s stories. These lines describing the different people were quick and a reader with montage in mind, can definitely picture a cinematic montage occurring as the reading continued.