Obama: A Poet in the Langston Hughes Tradition?

John Lundberg, a contributor at the excellent news & opinion collator Huffington Post, has written movingly and presciently about Barack Obama's recent Philadelphia speech in an article entitled Poems About Racism.

Beginning with an analysis of Obama's deft delivery-- highlighting the ways by which the Senator defused the media's tendency to reduce the best oratory into a collection of damning sound bytes-- the article moves forward to draw parallels between the life led by Hughes and the one led by Obama.

It gets better: the piece then quotes Hughes' poem "I, Too, Sing America", Michael S. Harper's "American History", Claude McKay's "The White House", and Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead", threading these American artifacts together into a narrative that culminates with Obama's address to the nation.

Perhaps the following lines from McKay's poem might serve as a fulcrum for the argument:

Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.

This may all seem counter-intuitive in the abstract-- after all, Obama never bussed tables and Hughes never ran for President-- but Lundberg makes the case convincingly, so please do check it out.