Review: Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric
- Sep 1, 2018
- 2 min read
In a meticulous combination of close reading, biblical exegesis, and literary analysis, W. Jason Miller, in Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric, offers an intriguing reinterpretation of Langston Hughes by demonstrating the influence Hughes's poetry exerted on the rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Miller focuses on the metaphor of the dream, which, in his formulation, derives principally from three of Hughes's poems: "Youth," "I Dream a World," and "A Dream Deferred." King, according to this argument, rewrote, revised, recycled, paraphrased, alluded to, rewrote, merged voices, and sampled Hughes's works for the thematic and rhetorical force to embellish his own sermons and speeches. The fundamental premise authorizing the unrestrained appropriation of Hughes's poetry is that, in the sermonic tradition of the old Black preacher, nothing is really new under the sun, freeing up preachers to borrow liberally from all sources, including each other.
Miller masterfully shows how King appropriates and submerges the poetic impulses of Hughes's poems in this well-known speech.
The path Miller charts from King's evolving poetic sensibility to the rhetorical tour de force in the "I Have a Dream" speech begins by exploring King's predisposition toward the poetic, an aesthetic vision that derives from a broad, eclectic reading into the Western tradition made famous by Wordsworth, Milton, Shelley, Arnold, Swinburne, and many more. Inspired by their beauty and expressive power, King would rewrite their words for use in cultivating his own rhetorical prowess. Miller is a bit tentative, however, in noting Hughes's acknowledgment of King's use of his poems. Publicly, Hughes thanked King for his kind words and the use he made of the poems in his sermons and speeches. More personally, though, Hughes was thought to be a bit peevish about King's often failure to acknowledge Hughes's authorship of the poems. Could there have been, in Miller's view, a subtle jibe Hughes takes at King because his poetry helped to raise sums of money for the civil rights movement but none was given to the poems' creator?
