Analysis Of Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

In 1926, Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life” (Langston Hughes). Langston Hughes is a famous African American author and poet, who lived from 1902 to 1967. He wrote in a modernist style during the time he was an author, which was from the 1920s to the 1960s. He is one of the many African American writers that helped advance the civil rights movement. Many things influenced his writing style. The Harlem Renaissance, the segregation of and discrimination against African Americans, and his personal experiences inspired him and influenced his writing.
The Harlem Renaissance inspired Langston Hughes and influenced his writing. The …show more content…
The speaker says in reflection about the poem:
We learn just a few things about those rivers. They are ancient as the world. They are primordial. They are even, it seems, prior to the human in this sense, prior to human blood which conventionally is a way of representing race, of speaking about race. So, the rivers are older it seems than any race, and yet they’re also an image of racial blood and flowing … The flowing of rivers is like the flowing of blood in the poem. And to know them is to know what is under or inside particular racial experience at the deepest level. (ENGL 310 Modern Poetry Lecture 15)
The lecturer shows how Hughes implemented the idea of African American pride in his writings. Another common part of Harlem Renaissance literature is the celebration of African American pride. Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” uses metaphors to show how Africans and their experience over time are like a river that keeps on flowing. There is no doubt that the Harlem Renaissance is one of the three major influences on Langston