Abstract
Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was a renowned and celebrated twentieth-century African-American poet who contributed significant literary outputs in the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance and also published poems for children. This chapter draws on Text World Theory to explore Hughes’ use of first-person pronouns in two poems from The Dream Keeper. In doing so, it demonstrates how the potential for ambiguous, dual referents is an important stylistic feature of Hughes’ presentation of childhood and children in poetry that is aimed at both adult and child audiences.
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Giovanelli, M. (2018). “We Have Tomorrow Bright Before Us Like a Flame”: Pronouns, Enactors, and Cross-Writing in The Dream Keeper and Other Poems . In: Gibbons, A., Macrae, A. (eds) Pronouns in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_3
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