Hyperbole The Landlord

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The 1930’s were an interesting time for many African-Americans. Even though they had been freed from slavery decades ago, they still felt oppression. Langston Hughes does a fantastic job of describing this oppression in the poem “Ballad of the Landlord”. The author’s purpose for writing this poem is to show the problems that African-Americans dealt with in the 1930’s which is exemplified through the use of hyperbole, change of lines in stanzas, and repetition. The first thing the author, Langston Hughes, used to bring out his purpose for writing is the use of hyperbole. This can be seen in lines twenty-three and twenty-four of the poem. “He’s trying to ruin the government, And overturn the land!” (Hughes 23, 24) The landlord immediately jumps to an extreme in these lines. The landlord immediately jumps to this conclusion when the African-American man is trying to resolve the issue of the condition of his house. The landlord immediately viewed the man as a hostile person when he tried to …show more content…

In the first two stanzas, the author repeats the word landlord twice in each stanza. This emphasizes the landlord specifically in both of these stanzas. He does this in order to show that the landlord is the main part of the issue that is being addressed and the one for the audience to focus on at the time. In the third stanza, the repeated phrase is “Ten Bucks”. This is repeated to show what the landlord lord believes the man owes him. This emphasizes the landlords desire to get something out of the man that is unnecessary. The fourth stanza repeats the phrase “You gonna,” at the beginning of the different lines. This exemplifies the man’s feeling of oppression from the landlord. The man asks the landlord how he is going to react to what is going on with him and the current issue. Each of these repeated words in the different stanzas are used to point out one of the many issues that is being addressed in the

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