Harlem
"What happens to a dream deferred?" Eleven lines, six questions, and one answer withheld — the most famous poem of Langston Hughes's later career, and the source of the title A Raisin in the Sun.
- 1951
- Eleven-line poem
About Langston Hughes
Six questions and an italic threat
The poem is almost all questions. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Fester like a sore? Stink like rotten meat? Crust over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe, the one declarative guess offers, it just sags, like a heavy load. Then the last line arrives in italics, still a question and no longer a domestic one: "Or does it explode?"
It appears in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), the book-length sequence in which Hughes portrayed postwar Harlem in the shifting rhythms of bebop — the poem is the sequence's thesis compressed to eleven lines. The dream deferred is the one the whole book documents: the promise Harlem was owed and had not been paid.
Its afterlife began almost immediately. [Lorraine Hansberry](person:lorraine-hansberry) took the title of A Raisin in the Sun (1959) from the second line, carrying the poem's question onto Broadway; in 1961 she, Hughes and [James Baldwin](person:james-baldwin) sat on the same radio panel about the Black writer in America. The poem has since become one of the most taught and most quoted American poems of the twentieth century — often under the informal title "A Dream Deferred."
Timeline
1951
Published in Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes's bebop portrait of postwar Harlem.
1959
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun opens on Broadway, its title taken from the poem's second line.
1961
Hughes, Hansberry and James Baldwin appear together on a WBAI radio panel on the Black writer in America.
Frequently asked questions
What is the poem Harlem by Langston Hughes about?
What happens to a dream that keeps being postponed. The poem never names the dream directly — in the context of Montage of a Dream Deferred, it is the promise of full American life for Black Americans — and answers only in questions: does the deferred dream shrivel, fester, rot, crust over, sag? The final italicized question, "Or does it explode?", is the poem's warning and its point.
What does "a dream deferred" mean?
A dream put off — not denied outright, but postponed again and again. Hughes's sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred applies the phrase to postwar Harlem: the neighborhood's patience with a promise that keeps not arriving. The poem asks what that postponement does to the people holding the dream.
Is Harlem the same poem as A Dream Deferred?
Yes. The poem's title is "Harlem"; "A Dream Deferred" is an informal title it picked up from its famous first line, and many anthologies and classrooms use the two interchangeably.
How is Harlem connected to A Raisin in the Sun?
Lorraine Hansberry took her play's title from the poem's second line — "Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" The 1959 play about a Black family's deferred dreams in Chicago carried Hughes's question to Broadway, and the poem is customarily printed as the play's epigraph.
When did Langston Hughes write Harlem?
It was published in 1951 in Montage of a Dream Deferred, the book-length sequence Hughes built from the rhythms of bebop to portray postwar Harlem. He was fifty, thirty years past the poem that opened his career.
