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…
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
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…
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