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It’s almost so obvious that it needn’t be stated explicitly, but the setting of Hughes’s poem is the United States of America. The speaker makes this clear from the very beginning, when they declare, “Let America be America again” (line 1). Perhaps less obvious, and yet crucial to understand, is the way the poem could be said to take place between two different Americas. The speaker implies as much in the opening line, where they repeat the word “America” as if to suggest that there are in fact multiple Americas, and they don’t quite coincide with each other. Simply put, the two Americas invoked in the poem are the dream America, which is founded on worthy ideals of freedom and equality, and the real America, which falls short of the dream in nearly every way. The speaker spends time describing each of these Americas, which live in tension with one another throughout the poem. Only in the poem’s final section does the speaker envision a way to unify the two Americas into a single nation, and hence “make America again” (line 86).

Next section Themes

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