Theme for English B

“Theme for English B” is part of Montage of a Dream Deferred, written in 1948, while Hughes was in his mid-forties. According to the editors of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Rampersad and Roessel, Hughes composed the book-length poem after he moved into a Harlem townhouse purchased with money from Street Scene, an opera he co-wrote. These details are one clue that Hughes takes on a persona, or character, for the speaker of “Theme for English B,” who is 22 and lives in a room at the YMCA. While many readers might assume that the first-person speaker of the poem is a younger version of the poet, the fact that the speaker and Hughes were born in different states—North Carolina and Missouri, respectively—further distinguishes the poem’s “I” from Hughes. The final biographical clue that separates the speaker from Hughes is that Hughes went to college in Columbia, while the speaker attends CCNY.

The truth is that the body of Hughes’s work contains many such personas who are separate from the poet. The speaker’s character could have been inspired by people the poet saw while living in Harlem, or he could be a completely imaginary person inspired by the vibe of Harlem and Hughes’s experiences in college classrooms.