Answer:
If you look closely at each of these authors' poems, you can recognize that they all talk about living in hard times. Carl Sandburg was a socialist who joined the Social Democratic Party.
Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first African American poets to gain national recognition. His parents Joshua and Matilda Murphy Dunbar were freed slaves from Kentucky.
Claude McKay was a Jamaican writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. McKay was attracted to communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party USA.
Langston Hughes took refuge in each of these poets, and he saw how the authors expressed themselves through their poetry.