Street Scenes: Langston Hughes, Lyric Pop, and Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire

Abstract

This article frames Langston Hughes’s 1947 collaboration with composer Kurt Weill on the “Broadway opera” Street Scene as a privileged opportunity to explore modern history’s extraordinary claims on poetic language and the limitations of allegoresis as a critical mode. Foregrounding Hughes’s understudied career as a pop songwriter, the article argues that the fragmented, unruly archive of the poet’s songwriting demands to be read allegorically, after the fashion of Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charles Baudelaire, whose own fusion of lyric and commodity forms anticipates Hughes’s pop lyrics. Ultimately, when we position Hughes as a successor of sorts to Benjamin’s Baudelaire, that “poet in the age of high capitalism,” we are invited at least temporarily to relieve the allegorical gaze of its restless search for hidden springs of critical agency and to relieve it, too, of its quest for the consolations of utopia. Hughes’s collaborative work on Street Scene instead teaches us how to locate and extol in seemingly compromised cultural artifacts an allegorical resourcefulness that precedes reception and is in fact synonymous, in Hughes’s case, with poetic making.