Langdon Hammer's Yale lecture on Modern Poetry (ENGL 310) turns to Langston Hughes, reading his poetry as a distinct response to the modernist moment shaped by Pound, Eliot, Frost, and Stevens. Hammer opens with a close reading of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," then traces how Hughes draws on blues and jazz forms to build a poetic voice rooted in African-American culture rather than the dominant modernist idiom. The lecture moves through "Song for a Dark Girl" and "Life Is Fine," examining Hughes's use of rhythm, repetition, and vernacular speech, while placing him in dialogue with, and in tension against, his white contemporaries. Recorded in 2007 as part of Yale's Open Courses, the session is organized around five chapters moving from a single poem's close reading outward to the broader question of Black voices within twentieth-century American poetry.