Dream Deferred

This was m favorite of the poems we read, mostly because of the imagery and visual comparisons used throughout. Langston Hughes uses mostly similes in his Dream Deferred such as "Does it stink like rotten meat?" to illustrate possible situations of a "dream deferred".  The first thing I did in order to understand this poem was to look up the term "deferred". It is important to know what is happening to the dream in question that all the similes are describing. The dictionary.com definition of deferred is "postponed or delayed". So the poem is exploring the idea of a dream that is being hinderred somehow. Another key aspect behind discovering the meaning of this poem is the fax that Langston Hughes was a black American. Therefore, it is not very far fetched to think that this poem might be about the dream of African Americans of equality. This dream was indeed deferred by American denial of their rights and equality. Also, as the final line in the poem states, the dream "exploded" during the civil right movement into the Civil Right Movement.