"It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
Hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?"

How does someone write something from the "self" that's "true"? Kind of a stumper, if you think about it. Because if you're just speaking for you, you're only speaking your truth. But this is exactly what Hughes's speaker does.

He thinks about what it means to write truly from his self, jumping off of a writing assignment his English professor gives to his class. What he comes up with is a mixture of him and his surroundings; he speaks to and for himself, Harlem, and his teacher. Oh, and there's the rest of New York too.

You just had to do it all, didn't you, Langston?

Hughes is all about mixing the high and the low. And not just that, his poems are catchy in the way a summer Top 10 hit is catchy. That's why his poetry has appealed to so many people, for so many generations.

So you'll notice that it's not just high school English teachers who are super into Hughes, but also your friend down the street who couldn't care less about English lit.

For him, mixing the high dialect with lower class, inner-city sounds, speech, and experiences was a way of making his poetry sound more like the music he heard in the Harlem clubs. We're talking jazz and the blues here, Shmoopers. Which is why in this poem, Harlem is what he "hears" when he thinks about what it means to write from his "self."

Harlem and its sounds are literally Hughes's poetic voice. Like how we're pretty certain the court jester's rhyming riddles were taken up in Shakespeare's writing style back in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

So think of Hughes as doing what others have always done and still do: mix the high and the low. Only to the tune of something a lot jazzier than a court jester.

And you know what? We're going to undermine ourselves for a second here, because there isn't really anything inherently "low" about the blues or jazz. What's "high" and what's "low" culture to you is pretty subjective; it's about how you "feel and see and hear," who you interact with on a daily basis, your social standing, and so on.

This mixing of "high" and "low" culture, then, is actually more a mixing of different artistic voices, that all come from somewhat unique perspectives. But trying to identify some unifying characteristics of a whole movement has a way of making you (er, us) over-simplify things…

Just don't tell your teacher we said that.

This stanza is all about the sound, the rhymes, the rhythm, and the blues. How do we know? For one, the speaker tells us so. He says, "I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you / hear you, hear me—we two—you, me talk on this page. / (I hear New York, too.) Me—who?"

See? His writing is all about hearing and speaking. About listening and creating sounds.

And then there are the rhymes, which repeat all over the place. We've got the "ee" sound, the "oo" sound—simple rhymes, in simple words like "two," "too," "you," "feel," "see," "me."

They're so simple, they might be taken right from a pop song. Which is kind of the point. Hughes is putting the sounds that surround him down onto the page, like a free-stylin' scribe. And a lot of those sounds, as it turns out, come from the popular music of his time.

And not from the Elizabethan sonnet. Or whatever other dense and complex poetry reading-fodder gives you nightmares. Hughes is a sweet, smooth read.