Langston Hughes’s work must be seen in context and continuity not only with African American writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, but with acknowledged white forebears such as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. A look at poems by Whitman and Sandburg reveal a writer who modeled some of his work on the writings of the earlier poets, revealing his own aesthetic alterations to the work of these earlier writers and establishing his contribution to the American traditions of poetry.