OK, all you English professors and poetry fans, I’m looking for a source for the following poem by Langston Hughes — when and where was it first published?
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond and jade,
Sit silently on their temple shelves
While the people
Are afraid.
Yet the ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond-jade,
Are only silly puppet gods
That the people themselves
Have made.
I found the poem here, but they provide no bibliographic information. It’s not in my copy of . Any ideas where it came from?
Dan,
I’m not an English major but I did do a Google search for the following text string:
“The ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond and jade,”
The first result was a Google Book page on the “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=uuREXd_sZyoC&pg=RA1-PA156&lpg=RA1-PA156&dq=The+ivory+gods,+And+the+ebony+gods,+And+the+gods+of+diamond+and+jade,&source=web&ots=R0zJPJFnGG&sig=mqp41DiwZs4wW94EbQujiBeek2Q&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
If you’re looking for a cite in time for a sermon tomorrow, this won’t help. But if you’re able to get to a library, you should be able to find this book.
Thanks, Steve. I don’t need a citation for a sermon, I’m just trying to make sure it really is a Langston Hughes poem. Too often, you find things are misattributed on the Web.
Now I will go dig up that book and find out when Hughes wrote the poem.