The Harlem Renaissance, By Langston Hughes
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
The Harlem Renaissance was an early 20th century movement in which writers and artists of colour explored what it means to be an artist, what it means to be black, and what it means to be an American, and also what it means to be all three of those things at the same time.
One journalist described the Harlem Renaissance this way: “What a crowd! All classes and colours met face to face, ultra aristocrats, bourgeois, park avenue galore, bookers, publishers, Broadway celebs, and Harlemites giving each other the once over.”
Harlem Renaissance began just after the First World War and lasted into the early years of the great depression. It was a social and political movement, but also an artist one. It inspired literature and poetry, music and drama, ethnography, publishing, dance, and fashion. As Langston Hughes wrote about this time: “The Negro was in vogue.” …show more content…
The poems of the Harlem renaissance often discus the so-called double consciousness of the African American experience, a term coined by W.E.B. Dubois in his book “The Souls of Black Folk.” Some writers like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay used poetic forms historically associated with European white people, like the Shakespearean sonnet, the Petrarchan sonnet and the villanelle. While other writers including Langston Hughes, chose forms based on African and African American folk forms.
LANGSTONS BIOGRAPHY
Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri to mixed-race parents, who divorced early. He grew up Kansas and began to write poetry in high school. Hughes’ father wanted him to become a mining engineer so Hughes went to Columbia University, but left in his first year. He then signed on to work on a boat, going more or less around the world, returning a couple of years later. He didn’t enjoy the trip much but that might have actually been a good thing because as he wrote in his autobiography: “My best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.” This stands in stark to all the happy poets.
Hughes aimed to write in accessible, familiar language, and in that he was influenced by people like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman all of whom wrote in vernacular, everyday language. Classical forms did not support the work he wanted to do. He didn’t want to do tricky things with rhymes by recreate the human soul. This is what makes Hughes such an important poet. He brilliantly combines formal poetry with the oral tradition, and he refuses to draw a bright line between fine art and folk art.
THE POEM
Hughes wrote this poem just after graduating from high school.
He was riding a train to see his estranged father and he passed over the Mississippi. He writes: “I began to think about what the river, the old Mississippi had meant to Negros in the past… then I began to think about other rivers in the past – the Congo, and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa – and the thought came to me: ‘I’ve known rivers,’ and I put it down on the back of an envelope I had in my pocket, and within the space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the train gathered speed in the dusk, I had written this poem.”
The Negro speaks of rivers is in the lyric mode: its poetry trying to capture an internal emotional state. He uses the vision of these rivers to transcend his immediate relationships and to connect himself instead to all his African fore fathers, trading the immediate for the immortal. The repetition of “I’ve known rivers” at the beginning and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” at the middle and end, gives the poem the feeling of a sermon or spiritual, in keeping with Hughes’ use of folk
forms.
And then, there’s the catalogue of active verbs: “I bathed”, “I built”, “I looked”, “I heard.” Those show people actively participating in human life and having agency: that even amid oppression and dehumanisation, these people were still building and listening and looking. And then, the latter part of the poem, there are adjectives that in other poems might be used pejoratively, like “muddy” and “dusky”, that are linked with other adjectives, “golden”, “ancient”, that encourage us to perceive them in a far more positive light. So, darkness and brownness are seen as lustrous and valuable and revered.
The Harlem Renaissance was an early 20th century movement in which writers and artists of colour explored what it means to be an artist, what it means to be black, and what it means to be an American, and also what it means to be all three of those things at the same time.
One journalist described the Harlem Renaissance this way: “What a crowd! All classes and colours met face to face, ultra aristocrats, bourgeois, park avenue galore, bookers, publishers, Broadway celebs, and Harlemites giving each other the once over.”
Harlem Renaissance began just after the First World War and lasted into the early years of the great depression. It was a social and political movement, but also an artist one. It inspired literature and poetry, music and drama, ethnography, publishing, dance, and fashion. As Langston Hughes wrote about this time: “The Negro was in vogue.” …show more content…
The poems of the Harlem renaissance often discus the so-called double consciousness of the African American experience, a term coined by W.E.B. Dubois in his book “The Souls of Black Folk.” Some writers like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay used poetic forms historically associated with European white people, like the Shakespearean sonnet, the Petrarchan sonnet and the villanelle. While other writers including Langston Hughes, chose forms based on African and African American folk forms.
LANGSTONS BIOGRAPHY
Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri to mixed-race parents, who divorced early. He grew up Kansas and began to write poetry in high school. Hughes’ father wanted him to become a mining engineer so Hughes went to Columbia University, but left in his first year. He then signed on to work on a boat, going more or less around the world, returning a couple of years later. He didn’t enjoy the trip much but that might have actually been a good thing because as he wrote in his autobiography: “My best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.” This stands in stark to all the happy poets.
Hughes aimed to write in accessible, familiar language, and in that he was influenced by people like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman all of whom wrote in vernacular, everyday language. Classical forms did not support the work he wanted to do. He didn’t want to do tricky things with rhymes by recreate the human soul. This is what makes Hughes such an important poet. He brilliantly combines formal poetry with the oral tradition, and he refuses to draw a bright line between fine art and folk art.
THE POEM
Hughes wrote this poem just after graduating from high school.
He was riding a train to see his estranged father and he passed over the Mississippi. He writes: “I began to think about what the river, the old Mississippi had meant to Negros in the past… then I began to think about other rivers in the past – the Congo, and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa – and the thought came to me: ‘I’ve known rivers,’ and I put it down on the back of an envelope I had in my pocket, and within the space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the train gathered speed in the dusk, I had written this poem.”
The Negro speaks of rivers is in the lyric mode: its poetry trying to capture an internal emotional state. He uses the vision of these rivers to transcend his immediate relationships and to connect himself instead to all his African fore fathers, trading the immediate for the immortal. The repetition of “I’ve known rivers” at the beginning and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” at the middle and end, gives the poem the feeling of a sermon or spiritual, in keeping with Hughes’ use of folk
forms.
And then, there’s the catalogue of active verbs: “I bathed”, “I built”, “I looked”, “I heard.” Those show people actively participating in human life and having agency: that even amid oppression and dehumanisation, these people were still building and listening and looking. And then, the latter part of the poem, there are adjectives that in other poems might be used pejoratively, like “muddy” and “dusky”, that are linked with other adjectives, “golden”, “ancient”, that encourage us to perceive them in a far more positive light. So, darkness and brownness are seen as lustrous and valuable and revered.