Published by Langston Hughes in 1921.

A reading by Langston Hughes can be found here.

Born James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901-1967) in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes came from a family of mixed-ancestry and was the descendent of both enslaved and slave-holding great-grandparents. Moving between nearly six U.S. cities until his mother settled in Cleveland, Hughes’s early years were spent mostly in isolation. In order to combat such loneliness, Hughes turned to writing, stating that “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books–where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas” ¹⁾. Shortly after graduating high school, Hughes traveled to Mexico to live with his father. It was on this trip that Hughes write one of his first, and one of his most significant pieces, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” This poem was published in June of 1921 in The Crisis magazine.

While in Mexico, Hughes was persuaded by his father to attend college with a focus in engineering. With his tuition being provided for by his father, Hughes moved to New York where he attended Columbia University. It has often been cited that Hughes was among one of the first Black men to live in Columbia’s dormitory, but other scholars have suggested he actually took up lodgings at the local YMCA. Struggling possibly with the racism of Columbia’s institution, Hughes left behind his academic career, taking on odd jobs until signing aboard the S. S. Malone as a crewman. From here, Hughes traveled to Africa and Europe, visiting places such as “West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy.” ²⁾. Hughes lived for a short time in Paris, working as a doorman, before returning to the United States.

On his return, Hughes continued to write while pursuing various occupations to support himself. In 1924, he won first prize in the Opportunity magazine for his poem “The Weary Blues” and received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University. During his studies, Hughes met Carl Van Vechten, a novelist and critic, who helped Hughes publish his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. By 1929, Hughes had graduated from Lincoln University and published his first novel Not Without Laughter. This novel won the Harmon Gold medal for literature and granted Hughes with enough literary acclaim to pursue writing as his sole career. Scholars have often cited Hughes as one of the first African Americans to be able to live solely off his proceeds as a writer.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Hughes became increasingly more interested in theatre, contributing to plays such as the Mule Bone with Zora Neal Hurston and the Broadway musical Street Scene. Hughes also traveled frequently during this period, sharing his poetry and lectures throughout the South and abroad in places like the Soviet Union, Japan, and Haiti. It was also during this time when Hughes published one of his more well-known and celebrated works titled “Harlem” in his collection Montage of a Dream Deferred. This poem inspired not only Lorrain Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun but also appears in a number of speeches by Martin Luther King.

Towards the end of his life, Hughes fell into disfavor with some literary groups due to his political passivity. According to the Poetry Foundation, “It was Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that ‘most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.’” ³⁾

Hughes passed away on May 22, 1967 due to complications from prostate cancer at the age of 66. His ashes were interred at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. Inscribed above his resting place are lines from his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.“ It reads: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

While the poem is generally summarized as a rumination on the endurance of enslaved African Americans and, by extension, how their legacy is experienced by their descendants and immortalized in the environment, interpretations do vary.*

Notably, the poem can be interpreted as a continuation of experience. Despite the speaker of the poem stating that in the past, they’ve “bathed in the Euphrates” and “heard the singing of the Mississippi,” the poem title, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” suggests that they are currently, in the present, speaking about the locations and experiences outlined in the poem (lines 5, 8). ⁴⁾ Thus, through the speaker’s voice, a connection to the places listed still exists and is being verbalized.

In addition, Hughes’s speaker chronologically locates both the rivers and themself as existing in a time “older than the flow of human blood” (2). ⁵⁾ In turn, the word “grown” gains relevance because Hughes’s speaker is suggesting that not only did the rivers mature and develop at one point, but the speaker has developed similarly with them (4). ⁶⁾ This would explain why the speaker’s “soul has grown deep like rivers” and why the poem expands upon the speaker’s activities alongside the rivers (12). ⁷⁾ What the speaker implies is that they have a lasting bond with the environment that has survived for a long time.

Arguably, the bond the speaker has with the environment has allowed them to imitate the river, and if we acknowledge that the speaker is imitating the rivers, the word “grown” has other implications (4). ⁸⁾ Specifically, “grown” could also refer to the accumulation or inheritance of experience when we consider all the lives lost to slavery and acknowledge bodies of water as final resting places for enslaved individuals (4). ⁹⁾ Despite tragedy, the speaker has continued to “flow” and exist, but perhaps more importantly, the speaker’s “soul has grown deep” enough to hold those who have not survived (12). ¹⁰⁾

*For example, the above interpretation directly contradicts the one expanded upon in the article “Justice, Lynching, and American Riverscapes: Finding Reassurance in Langston Hughes’s ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’” but W. Jason Miller in which he writes:

Its tenses imply that intimacy with riverscapes is exclusively reserved for the previous generations of African Americans who lived before slavery, an intimacy since denied in the United States by slavery and racism. In contrast to the present tense of ‘Speaks’ in the title, the poem moves through the repetitive sequence of past events from the ‘have’ suggested in the contraction ‘I’ve (used four times in the poem) to ‘bathed,’ ‘built,’ ‘looked’, ‘and ‘heard.’ In this way, Hughes depicts riverscapes, as part of a natural realm needing to be reclaimed as a site that African Americans have known and should now know. ¹¹⁾

• Congo River: “river in west-central Africa. With a length of 2,900 miles (4,700 km), it is the continent’s second longest river, after the Nile” ¹²⁾ Britannica Link

• Euphrates River: “river, Middle East. The longest river in southwest Asia, it is 1,740 miles (2,800 km) long, and it is one of the two main constituents of the Tigris-Euphrates river system” ¹³⁾ Britannica Link

• Mississippi River: “the longest river of North America, draining with its major tributaries an area of approximately 1.2 million square miles (3.1 million square km), or about one-eighth of the entire continent” ¹⁴⁾ Britannica Link

*Each of these rivers are associated with a form of slavery. Enslaved peoples brought to the Americas via ships endured horrible conditions, and Howard Zinn points out that “Slaves often jumped overboard to drown rather than continue their suffering.” ¹⁵⁾ Moreover, the Euphrates River was mentioned in the Bible and may be associated with various slave songs. In A History of African American Poetry, Lauri Ramey maintains that “Representing African survivals melded with the experience of the Middle Passage and plantation culture, the origins of slave songs date to the moment of kidnap in Africa.” ¹⁶⁾ However, if you are attempting to connect Hughes's poem to slave songs, please note that “It is a misperception that these sung poems [slave songs] were all 'spiritual' in nature.” ¹⁷⁾

Author’s Own Words:

In a video titled, “Langston Hughes reads The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” uploaded by Poetry Reading Live,* Hughes offers the following information regarding the poem and his thought process while writing it. Below is a transcription (0:03-1:42) of a segment of the video:

This is the Negro Speaks of Rivers, one of my earliest poems, written in 1920, just after I came out of high school. The way this poem came to be written was that I was going to Mexico to visit my father who lived in Mexico City and on the train going across the Mississippi River just outside St. Louis, I looked out the window and I saw this great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South, and I began to think about what this River meant to the Negro people how in a sense our history was linked to this river, how in slavery times my grandmother* told me that to be sold down the Mississippi was one of worst things that could happen to a negro slave and then uh I remembered that I’d read about Abraham Lincoln going down the Mississippi as a young man and he went on a raft to New Orleans and he saw human beings bought and sold in the slave market there and he was so horrified by this that he never forgot it and many years later of course we know that it was Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and so as the train went on into the gathering dust because it had been about sunset when we crossed the river I took my father’s letter out of my pocket and began to write down on the back of his letter this poem ¹⁸⁾

*While the audio-recording uploaded to YouTube does not have a verifiable source, the link provided by the uploader redirects users to a page that does not contain an audio or video file, the information provided is corroborated in a recording published by UCLA

*During his lifetime, “Hughes recalled that his Kansas grandmother was the last surviving widow of John Brown's Raid.” ¹⁹⁾

Publication Information:

In 1921, Hughes’s poem was published in the June issue of The Crisis magazine,* which “is the official publication of the NAACP and the nation’s oldest African American publication.” ²⁰⁾

*While perusing the linked issue of The Crisis in which Hughes’s work appears, it is important to remember the timeframe in which the magazine was published. In particular, while the issue does appear to use the swastika as a decorative border, on the page on which Hughes’s poem is printed, the symbol appears a total of seven times, Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, in her article “‘Something really very odd and singularly appropriate:’ The Fashionable Swastika in the US Before 1939,” maintains that the symbol was widely used until “the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 would finally affix the meaning of the swastika to Nazism for an American audience” ²¹⁾. Additionally, the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives has a letter from 1924, in which the magazine's creator/founder, W. E. B Du Bois²²⁾ wrote that “The ‘Swastika’ used as a decoration in our paper appeared quite by accident” and acknowledged that “many persons have objected to its use because it seems that the Anti-Semites of Europe have taken it as their especial symbol.” ²³⁾ For more information, The Holocaust Encyclopedia provides an informative timeline titled "The History of the Swastika."

Literary History:

Roughly five years after “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published, Hughes’s wrote “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926).” In the essay, Hughes argues that “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness” is harming “the Negro poet.” ²⁴⁾ Hughes’s essay is representative of larger conversations taking place regarding the consumption, creation, and popularity of African American art.

This is one of Hughes’s most well-known poems, and in his article, “Justice, Lynching, and American Riverscapes: Finding Reassurance in Langston Hughes’s ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’” W. Jason Miller highlights and emphasizes the popularity of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” noting that the poem was “recited” prior to Hughes’s cremation. ²⁵⁾ However, the poem's popularity status is problematic. Hughes has a large collection of poetry to choose from, but “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is anthologized most frequently because it is an “‘accessible’ poem,” according to Lauri Ramey. ²⁶⁾ In an audio-recording, Hughes acknowledges the popularity of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” referring to it as “the most um famous of my poems.” ²⁷⁾

Historical Information:*

According to Howard Zinn, around the time Hughes’s poem was published, the Ku Klux Klan “was revived,” which is significant when considering some of the content published in The Crisis. ²⁸⁾ For example, the issue includes article entries titled, “Anti-Intermarriage Bill in Michigan,” “Anti-Lynching Bill in West Virginia,” “Minnesota Anti-Lynching Bill.”

*Refer to Harlem Renaissance

Free-Verse

Hughes’s poem has no particular form as it uses neither rhyme nor a consistent line structure. It has generally been classified by critics as free-verse, drawing upon metaphor and repetition to convey its intention. The use of repetition acts as a refrain in the lines: “My soul has grown deep like the river” (lines 4, 12) ²⁹⁾. This line functions as the overarching metaphor of the poem while the repetition of “I’ve known rivers” ³⁰⁾ draws out this metaphor to specify its purpose by indicating various symbolic places and historical allusions (lines 1, 2, 10).

In a video titled, “Langston Hughes Speaking at UCLA 2/16/1967” and uploaded by UCLA Irv and Xiaoyan Drasnin Communication Archive, Hughes speaks about “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and specifically comments on the form of the poem and his writing process. Below is a transcription (22:26-22:52) of a segment of the video:

Well, now, most of my poems are written that way. They are what you might call spontaneous or improvisational poems. I guess I’m not the kind of poet who studies and ponders and works in strict forms, and I’m not against writing in the sonnet form or the Rondeau or whatever forms you may be able to master. It just hasn’t happened to be my way of writing. Um, this is a free-verse poem… ³¹⁾

Additionally, while not referring directly to the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the same video, Hughes also mentions Carl Sandburg, a writer he maintains inspired his own writing, at which time Hughes highlights the fact that Sandburg was criticized for choosing to write in free verse. ³²⁾

Musical Considerations:

During Hughes’s lifetime, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was put to music and recognizable in song format. Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) wrote music for Hughes’s poem. ³³⁾

When reading Hughes’s poetry, it may be helpful to look for musical elements or potential musical influences* as Hughes was a prominent figure in the Jazz community and even wrote a children’s book called The First Book of Jazz, which was published in 1955. ³⁴⁾ Moreover, Hughes in his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” wrote, “Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz.” ³⁵⁾

*Refer to Key Terms

Coming on the tail end of the Great Migration –where urban areas saw an influx of Black citizens as a result of Jim Crow laws–the Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of Black literary and artistic celebration. Central to Harlem, this movement was known at its conception as the “New Negro Movement” and spanned from the 1910s to the mid 1930s. This period “is considered a golden age in African American culture,” with Harlem being referred to as the “Black cultural mecca.” ³⁶⁾

At its height, Harlem became a neighborhood bustling “with African American-owned and run publishing houses, newspaper, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets,” where the diversity of Black art could be found in its “poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance.” ³⁷⁾ Leading figures of the movement include W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, Walter Francis White, Claude McKay, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Fats Weller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes was considered “a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance,” ³⁸⁾ known more specifically as “an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator, and social activist”³⁹⁾ during this period. Through his writing, Hughes sought to reduce the often stereotypical and sentimental depictions of Black Americans in American literature by writing from the perspective of working-class Blacks and their subsequent joys and hardships. Drawing upon jazz, blues and likewise Black vernacular, Hughes broke through the social barriers of what was considered “low-rate” art and harnessed it as inspiration for his writing, the likes of which can be found in his poem “The Weary Blues.” Hughes faced considerable critique from his contemporaries who viewed his writing as perpetuating the low forms of Black culture and art, while Hughes merely sought to record “faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations.” ⁴⁰⁾ In his own words, Hughes viewed his poetry as being about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.” ⁴¹⁾

Hughes has additionally been credited with making the movement more well-known through his poetry tours, even coining its current title in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940).

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