Its jazz poetry style focuses on scenes over the course of a 24-hour period in Harlem (a neighborhood of New York City) and its mostly African-American inhabitants.
[2] Hughes' prefatory note for the book explained his intentions in writing the collection: In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of a jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.
[4] The poem is characterized by its use of the montage, a cinematic technique of quickly cutting from one scene to another in order to juxtapose disparate images, and its use of contemporary jazz modes like boogie-woogie, bop and bebop, both as subjects in the individual short poems and as a method of structuring and writing the poetry.
[5] Its themes include the subjugation of the black community, African-American racial consciousness and history, and the need for social change to resolve the injustices faced by the residents of Harlem.
"[5] Montage of a Dream Deferred was Langston Hughes' first major publication following the end of World War II.