"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1925)

One of Hughes’s most famous poems, “The Weary Blues” is an example of Hughes’s jazz poems of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem is set in a bar in Harlem as the speaker observes a pianist playing blues music. The poem creatively utilizes literary devices like rhyme and meter that come together to embody blues as a form and a metaphor. The poem is considered one of the first works of blues performance in literature, and its vivid imagery and language highlight the struggle of life for a Black American man during the mid-1920s.

"If We Must Die" by Claude McKay (1919)

“If We Must Die” by African American poet Claude McKay is a response to racial violence against Black Americans during the Red Summer of 1919, a period after the First World War when white supremacist terrorism and riots took place across the United States, resulting in numerous deaths of African Americans. Although the poem does not mention any specific marginalized group, it is a traditional Shakespearean sonnet that encourages strength and hope against a deadly mob. The poem is considered by some to be the official start to the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement.