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    Literary Analysis Langston Hughes

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    The document provides an analysis of Langston Hughes' famous poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". It discusses how the poem explores themes of African American history and identity that Hughes explored throughout his work. The poem uses imagery of rivers, repetition, and collective voice to reinforce these themes. Critics argue the poem transforms personal experiences into reflections on the broader Black American experience, and that Hughes alchemized personal anguish into a meditation on his race. The poem was influenced by Hughes' life experiences, including his relationship with his estranged father, memories of slavery, and travels along rivers like the Mississippi.

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    Literary Analysis Langston Hughes

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    The document provides an analysis of Langston Hughes' famous poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". It discusses how the poem explores themes of African American history and identity that Hughes explored throughout his work. The poem uses imagery of rivers, repetition, and collective voice to reinforce these themes. Critics argue the poem transforms personal experiences into reflections on the broader Black American experience, and that Hughes alchemized personal anguish into a meditation on his race. The poem was influenced by Hughes' life experiences, including his relationship with his estranged father, memories of slavery, and travels along rivers like the Mississippi.

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    The document provides an analysis of Langston Hughes' famous poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". It discusses how the poem explores themes of African American history and identity that Hughes explored throughout his work. The poem uses imagery of rivers, repetition, and collective voice to reinforce these themes. Critics argue the poem transforms personal experiences into reflections on the broader Black American experience, and that Hughes alchemized personal anguish into a meditation on his race. The poem was influenced by Hughes' life experiences, including his relationship with his estranged father, memories of slavery, and travels along rivers like the Mississippi.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    193 views3 pages

    Literary Analysis Langston Hughes

    Uploaded by

    api-463277619
    The document provides an analysis of Langston Hughes' famous poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". It discusses how the poem explores themes of African American history and identity that Hughes explored throughout his work. The poem uses imagery of rivers, repetition, and collective voice to reinforce these themes. Critics argue the poem transforms personal experiences into reflections on the broader Black American experience, and that Hughes alchemized personal anguish into a meditation on his race. The poem was influenced by Hughes' life experiences, including his relationship with his estranged father, memories of slavery, and travels along rivers like the Mississippi.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    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.

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