Gianna Preising

English 10

12 January 2018

Mrs. Foltz

"Explanation of: 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' by Langston Hughes." ​LitFinder Contemporary
Collection,​ Gale, 2007. ​LitFinder​,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/LTF0000000511CE/LITF?u=glen70185&sid=LITF&xid=222be1d5​.
Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.

Langston Hughes: ​The Negro Speaks of Rivers​ Analysis

The Negro Speaks of Rivers​ was written in 1921 by Langston Hughes. It soon became

one of his most famous poems written at only 19 years of age. The poem expresses themes that

Hughes had explored throughout his entire life; the experiences of African Americans in history,

black identity, and pride. Hughes argues for the depth, endurance, and wisdom of the African

soul through his images of rivers, African civilizations, and a voice who speaks for the race. His

themes are reinforced through the form of the poem. He used long lines, a collective, mythic “I”,

and repetition of phrases. This form also cites the poetry of Walt Whitman who sang America

throughout his works as well. Hughes, unlike Whitman, “celebrates not the America that is but

that America that is to come.”

Across critical overview, it is not claimed that ​The Negro Speaks of Rivers​ is particularly

“propagandistic.” The poem is sometimes considered to be one of his lyrics which are often

considered to be nonpolitical, even including its moralizing tendency. The poem is considered a

lyric because of the use of a first person speaker who conveys passionate emotion and appears to

exist outside of time. Critics suggest that the lyric speaker begins with a personal memory but
moves soundly toward collective memory. In his essay, “Hughes: Evolution of the Poetic

Persona,” Raymond Smith argues that in both early and later poems, Hughes “transforms

personal experience and observations into distillations of the Black American condition.” Arnold

Rampersand agrees and continued to further analyze ​The Negro Speaks of Rivers. ​In his essay

“The Origins of Poetry in Langston Hughes”, his similar argument is “personal anguish has been

alchemized by the poet into a gracious meditation on his race, whose despised (“muddy”) culture

and history… changes within the poem from mud into gold.” He also argued the concern for

death and time in the traditional lyric poem. In ​The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol.1,​ Rampersand

writes about how ​The Negro Speaks of Rivers​ contains imagery of death while at the same time

portraying the idea of deathlessness through his allusions to deep dusky rivers, the setting sun,

sleep, and the soul.

Hughes’s poems were heavily influenced by his life. His anxieties about his father

commonly caused his personal anguish. ​The Negro Speaks of Rivers​ was written on a train that

Hughes took to visit his alienated father in Mexico. In his documentation of the poem’s

configuration, Hughes reveals his personal meditation and its success as it was transformed

through associating on integrated racial identity along with meditation history and how in his

career, his lyrics became statements that were truly art. He was crossing the Mississippi outside

of Saint Louis, Missouri, where he was born, and remembered, “I looked out the window…

[and] began to think what that [muddy] river, the old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in the

past- how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave… Then I

remembered reading how Abraham Lincoln had made a trip down the Mississippi on a raft, …

seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from
American life. Then I began to think of other rivers in our past….” Hughes incorporated his own

culture into his works, specifically jazz as it was relevant to his African-American race. Langston

Hughes’s powerful, poetic, and lyrical voice had been influenced by many hardships faced in his

life and the lives of other Africans. Some of his challenges and inspirations included his

estranged father, slavery, travels, and previous authors. Hughes had been a revolutionary at his

time and had been such a true talent that he is still vividly remembered more than one hundred

years after his death.