The Negro Speaks of Rivers (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Langston Hughes
- First Published: 1921
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: African Americans
The Poem
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is Langston Hughes’s most anthologized poem. Hughes wrote this brief poem in fifteen minutes in July, 1920, while crossing the Mississippi on a train ride to visit his father in Mexico. It is one of Hughes’s earliest poems, and its subject established the emphasis of much of his subsequent poetry. Hughes’s poems may be divided into several categories: protest poems, social commentary, Harlem poems, folk poems, poems on African and negritude themes, and miscellaneous poetry on various other nonracial subjects and themes. “The...
[The entire page is 1376 words long]
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