Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance—a period of remarkable Black creativity from the 1920s until the mid-1930s. Hughes wrote “I look at the world” in 1930 during the period. Indeed, the poem reflects one of the core values of the Harlem Renaissance: It centers on a Black individual and their feelings. The poem begins: “I look at the world” (Line 1). This is how a Black person views America. The poem communicates what they see and how they perceive it; the speaker is not going to water down their thoughts to please others. Arguably, the speaker’s confidence and power to speak their truth about racism in the United States is bolstered by the Harlem Renaissance and its ability to provide, more or less, an unfiltered platform for Black voices.

Modernism is another literary context for “I look at the world.” Modernism is commonly associated with white writers and poets like Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot. The emergence of big cities, advancements in technology, the rise of psychoanalysis, and the horrors of World War I shaped modernists and their view that the world, and the people in it, were fractured and alienated.