The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human viens.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euprates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the signing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes' The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The 1920s saw Langston Hughes come of age as a poet (Barksdale 16). The Negro Speaks of Rivers was his first major poem to be published in The Crisis, the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Berry 24). He followed with two books of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926 and Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927. He also won Opportunity magazine's poetry prize for his poem "The Weary Blues" in 1925. Also in 1926, he published his first major literary essay titled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (Barksdale 16). In this essay, Hughes revealed that choosing the life of the black folk as a basis for his art was really a way of choosing himself, a way of possessing himself through the rhythms and traditions of black people (Kent 19). The Negro Speaks of Riv

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of his love of black people but because of the depth of his psychological dependence on them (39). He argues this need felt by Langston for the black folk was the main legacy of his grandmother, Mary Langston. Mary engendered a respect for the nature and culture of black folk in Langston through the tales she told him as a child (Rampersad 39). However, Ramperad also argues Hughes developed a psychological dependence on the black folk because Mary Langston's zeal to defend the rights of her race was offset by her personal remoteness from the race and the severity of her pride. She did not attend black churches, did not sing black spirituals (much less the blues); she spoke in a clipped manner, rather than a folksy drawl, and she detested popular culture (Rampersad [Origins] 186). Thus, Langston could not turn to his own personal history and culture to develop fully the creative personality he felt within himself. Instead, as an alternative to the bitter struggles between himself and his father and grandmother, he turned to the black race for direction. Robert Meltzer argues Hughes's poems are like the blues, "songs folks made up when their heart hurts" (Meltzer 62). Hughes himself revealed in his autobiography that he usu

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