Poetry Wednesday 07/22/09: Montage Of A Dream Deferred

A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959.

In 1960 A Raisin In The Sun was nominated for four Tony Awards:

Best Play – Written by Lorraine Hansberry; produced by Philip Rose and David J. Cogan.

Best Actor in Play -Sidney Poitier; Best Actress in a Play – Claudia McNeil; Best Direction of a Play: Lloyd Richards.

The story is based upon a family’s own experiences growing up in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood.

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway.

The title comes from the opening lines of “Montage of a Dream Deferred”, a poem by Langston Hughes (“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”)

Throughout the play, the idea of deferred dreams is a prominent theme, as each member of the Younger family attempts to find his or her place amidst a number of difficult situations.

Montage of a Dream Deferred recited by Danny Glover

Montage of a Dream Deferred
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–
and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load

Or does it just explode?

Hello, and welcome back to Poetry Wednesday 7/22/09. You can sign in today and take the tour thru Thursday, so take your time.

I’ll be your hostess again this week. My sister, Sans Souci, has completed her poetry book, and is taking a break, but she will check in.

Before we get started, please make sure that your post has a link to get back to this page to make it easier to take the tour:

1) Copy and paste the following link that I have provided for you from this page to somewhere on your poetry post.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

2) Leave the link of your poetry post in the comments section below. This is the link guests will click on to read your poem.
The play is mainly about the Youngers, as they dream of leaving behind the run-down tenement apartment where they have lived since Lena and Walter Sr. were married.

The son, Walter, a chauffeur, dreams of making a fortune by investing in an alcohol store but foolishly gives his money to a con-artist.

His sister, Beneatha, a college student, tries to find her identity and embraces the back-to-africa philosophy of a Nigerian friend, Joseph Asagai.

The family’s matriarch, Lena, dreams of buying a house, and does so with money from her late husband’s insurance policy, but the house is in an all-white neighborhood. Their racist future neighbors send one of their members, a man named Karl Lindner, as a “welcoming committee” to try to buy them out to prevent the neighborhood’s integration. Walter Lee, suffering the reverses of having been swindled, initially contemplates taking the money, but ultimately refuses to be intimidated or bought out.

The underlying theme of Hansberry’s Raisin is in the question posed by Langston Hughes’ poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” when he asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” and then goes on to list the various things that might happen to a person if his dreams are put “on hold,” emphasizing that whatever happens to a postponed dream is never good.

More simply, the question Hansberry poses in her play is, “What happens to a person whose dreams grow more and more passionate–while his hopes of ever achieving those dreams grow dimmer each day?”

We see clearly what happens to Walter as his dream continues to be postponed by too many circumstances that are beyond his control.

A Raisin in the Sun – Introduction by David Susskind (hey, remember him ?)

LANGSTON HUGHES, was part of the Harlem Renaissance and was known during his lifetime as “the poet laureate of Harlem”. He also worked as a journalist, dramatist, and children’s author. His poems, which tell of the joys and miseries of the ordinary black man in America, have been widely translated. James Langston Hughes was born on Feb. 1, 1902, in Joplin, Mo. In 1921 he enrolled at Columbia University in New York City but he was so lonely and unhappy that he left after a year.

He worked at various jobs, including that of a seaman, traveling to Africa and Europe. His first book of poetry, ‘The Weary Blues’, published in 1926, made him well known among literary people. He went on to Lincoln University in Oxford, Pa., on a scholarship and received his B.A. degree there in 1929.

From then on Hughes earned his living as a writer, portraying black life in the United States with idiomatic realism. ‘Not without Laughter’, a novel
published in 1930, won him the Harmon god medal for literature. A book of poems for children, ‘The Dream Keeper’, came out in 1932. In 1934 appeared ‘The Ways of White Folk’s’, a collection of short stories. His play ‘Mulatto’ opened on Broadway in 1935. He wrote the lyrics for ‘Street Scene’, a 1947 opera by Kurt Weill. Hughes also lectured in schools and colleges, where he talked with black youth who had literary ability and encouraged them to write.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Hughes’s work included a volume of poetry, ‘Montage of a Dream Differed’, published in 1951; of short stories, ‘Laughing to Keep from Crying’ (1952); and a children’s picture book
titled ‘Black Misery'(1969), which wryly illustrates what it is like to grow up black in the United States.

Langston Hughes died of Lung Cancer, in New York City, in 1967.

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