What is Freedom?

In his poems Langston Hughes questions freedom and the American dream. Out of all the poems that we read my favorites were "Let America Be America Again" and "Open Letter to the South".

In "Let America Be America Again" Hughes discussed that the America dream has disappeared. The America that was living in was not the America that him and his anc

estors came to. He entered this country with high hopes. He thought of America as a place where "opportunity is real, and life is free

" a place where "Equality is in the air we breathe". He found out that these things do not exist. Hughes wants "America [to] be America again", he wants the people "whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain" made this country to be free again and for their "mighty dreams" to be restored.

In "Open Letter to the South" Hughes proposed that blacks and the working class white men unite because they are essentially equals. I think he was right, the population was composed of primarily the working class, who like blacks were treated unfairly at the time. If these two social groups could have united against the rich white population they could have had a strong union and gained their rights back.

What does the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" mean?

T.S Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is very confusing and can intrepreted in many ways. In this poem the speaker have some sort of "overwhelming question" that he wants to ask a girl at a tea party. Many believe that this question is a marriage proposal.

I think it is a marriage proposal but at certain points in the poem it seems like the narrator does not want to be married, like he is being forced to ask this "overwhelming question". At

line 39 I think the speaker is looking into the future thinking he will regret his decision to ask the girl to marry him, he says "Do I dare?" and then continues on to say "with a bald spot in the middle of my hair". I think this line means that he is looking at himself as an old, balding man and he thinks he will regret marrying, or asking this girl to marry him.

While he is questioning his decision Prufrock then says "Do I dare?/ Disturb the universe?". This line also supports the idea that Prufrock is being forced into asking someone to marry him. After reading the poem i got the impression that the speaker is a younger man, so maybe his family is forcing him into marriage, or maybe both his family and the girls family have an agreement for the two of them to get married, so by not asking her he would be "disturb[ing] the universe".

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" can be looked at from many different perspectives. I think that the poem is about a man who is forced, or is feeling pressured, into asking a woman to marry him.