"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes: catharsis and the healing power of poetry and music

“The Weary Blues” (1925) is a poem by Langston Hughes resonating both thematically and stylistically with the blues, a form that in Ralph Ellison’s words constitutes an “autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” One of the first works of blues performance in literature, the poem describes a pianist singing a blues number in a Harlem club. The chapter will focus on the healing power of poetry and music as revealed in “The Weary Blues”. Simultaneously both a melancholic method of grievance and a therapy for sorrow, Hughes’s poem ‒ and the gloomy blues song it evokes ‒ nurture a cathartic purification of the emotional condition of sadness and loneliness. The very act of writing and singing the blues releases the anguish felt by the poet and the pianist, and becomes an antidote to the discomfort expressed by the poem and the song.