Analysis Of Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

Langston Hughes was considered one of the principal and prominent voices of Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and 1930s. His poetry encompasses heterogeneity of subject matters and motifs concerning working African-Americans who were excluded and deprived of power. His choice of theme was accentuated and manifested through the convergence of African-American vernacular and blues forms. My attempt is to analyze the implications of the most significant poems by first introducing the author, examining the relevance of the poems and then, contrast them with Richard Wright’s antagonistic perspective.
Langston Hughes (born in 1902) became one of the major representatives of the Harlem Renaissance. His priority was to capture the Negro essence and manifest it through his writings omitting racial stereotypes. His first volume of poetry was published in 1926 and it was sponsored by wealthy patrons. In the 1930s, Hughes got involved in politics, and joined the American Communist Party because of its intention to suppress race as the latent and deciding factor of social class. The most idiosyncratic feature that characterizes Hughes is, and as Johnson and Farrell point out, that he is “the first poet in
the world to transform the idioms of blues and jazz into poetic verse”. Hughes’s career displays the solidity of the Harlem Renaissance as the basis of modern African American literature.
His first published poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” became an emblematic literary piece and it established his early reputation among African-American writers.
The speaker of the poem describes the rivers to be ancient and then he identifies himself with the rivers saying that [his] “soul has grown deep like the rivers”. He then enumerates different rivers (Nile, Euphrates and Mississippi) and places with historical implications: Congo and New Orleans. The latter appears in the same line with Lincoln, which clearly alludes to emancipation of the slaves. The poem ends with the repetition of the line “my soul has grown deep like the rivers”, which emphasizes the significance of identifying his soul with the rivers, establishing some similarities which we will examine
further.
As a whole, the poem can be seen as “a claim of racial identity, of shared consciousness, of a Negro intersubjectivity in which old world and new world stand together in a mutual relationship that predates European civilization” (Warren 1993, p.392).The shared consciousness is conveyed by the multiple allocation of the “I”: that is, the diversity of places and events the “I” had witnessed may illustrate a more collective view. Hence, the constant use of the lyrical “I” as the whole African American community highlights the importance of cultural and traditional contribution that Afro-Americans made to the European civilization. Hughes in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” also touches upon this influential contribution saying that “the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears”. In other words, the Afro-American community can enrich our experience, but not only in literature, as Hughes points out in the essay, but in the culture and history.
Methodologically, the poetic voice has its own