Langston Hughes got 100% of the votes for the most admired, enjoyed, or respected African American poet. He is the most famous Black poet.
Whenever any discussion of African American poetry takes place, one can count on the poet Langston Hughes being part of that discussion. Therefore, I was not too surprised to see him get all of the votes in the latest poll. However, all of the other contenders are fairly well known.
Rita Dove served as United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Thomas and Beulah. One of her best-known poems is titled “Parsley,” which she read at the White House. Dove was motivated to write this poem by the “creativity” of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who slaughtered thousands of Haitians who could not pronounce the Spanish “r”.
Gwendolyn Brooks, a Chicago poet, who also served as Poet Laureate (1985-86) has a wide audience, with such poems as “We Real Cool” and “The Mother,” plus she has been interviewed by many magazines and news outlets. Brooks won numerous awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim and the Academy of American Poets.
Robert Hayden, whose masterpiece, “Those Winter Sundays,” is one of those poets who certainly deserve a wider audience. He is a much more accomplished poet than Langston Hughes, but not nearly as well known. His contribution to racial understanding far exceeds that of Hughes.
Sterling A. Brown, born to a middle class family in Washington D.C., graduated from the prestigious Dunbar High School, then from Williams College earning Phi Beta Kappa his junior, and then earned the M.A. degree from Harvard. After teaching at several colleges in the south, Brown returned to Harvard, where he completed the PhD and then served forty years teaching at Harvard. Brown continued to study “folk” literature and ways, and these themes show up in his poetry.
