Montage of a Dream Deferred

To mark the end of our poetry club, I decided to share some poems from my most favorite work of poetry, Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. Published in 1951, Montage is a send-up of everything beautiful and terrible in Black culture in post-war Harlem. One of the strongest themes in the book is the representation music in the poems.

I decided to put together a mini-folio of Mr. Hughes's "jazz poems" for us to read over the last two days of the poetry club. Since most of these poems are not available online, I used my copy of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes as a source for the mini-folio. Where before I had handed out slips of paper containing each poem that the students kept afterward, for our Montage days I passed out a full page of poetry and took it back up so that they would be sure to have it on our final Montage day. Students were free to keep the handout after the last reading.

You can click here to see a PDF of the mini-folio that I passed out to students.

I was very glad that my send-off to my awesome students could be some of my most favorite poems. I hope that they will carry these poems around with them for years to come.