By alluding to Whitman’s poem in "I, Too, Sing America" Hughes was able to

Langston Hughes’s title echoes Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing.” By invoking Whitman, Hughes connects his poem to an established tradition of writing about American identity while insisting that Black Americans belong in that story too. This draws on U.S. cultural heritage rather than rejecting it or claiming to write about the country in a completely new way.

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