The Challenging Poets of Langston Hughes

Hughes tried to create a poetry that evoked the spirit of bare America, and this necessitated creating a colored identity that made sense to him and that would appeal to his audience at the same time. The voice he developed came from his take care and reflected the experience of the dingy masses he represented. His writings of every salmagundi told the story of the ignominious man in America.

In his poetry, Hughes considers the pourboire of view of the blacken man and how it differs from that of the white, though he sees that two are Americans. He links his voice to that of all black men through time in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," a poetry in which he says "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins" (2). This ancient past is in spite of appearance his soul, and his soul is genius with the ancient rivers, growing as deep as they were. in that respect is a long black memoir that has been largely disregard by white society, which treats all history as a white history. The speaker knows that this is not so and that within him is that legality his instructor says will come out on the foliate:

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut lift the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised my pyramids above it (4-6).

This ancient history is connected to the slave history in America as he refers to Mississippi and Abe Lincoln and modernistic Orleans, and the Mississippi River is just one more of the ancient rivers he has kno

The link Hughes makes with his past is carried forth into the plight of the black today, and in "Mother to Son" he indicates how the will to break and to thrive is passed from one generation to the next.

The mother in this poem represents all black mothers, and she emphasizes that her way has not been easy:

She has persisted in spite of the difficulties, however--"I'se been a-climbin' on" (9)--and this is the lesson she offers her child--"So boy, don't you turn back" (14). In his search for the truth, Hughes does not turn back, and he knows that there is within every black man a truth to be expressed and that is every bit as important as what is expressed by a white person. His poetry is infused with a sense of history and links between generations to show how the black man has survived:

The rivers are part of God's body, and participate in his immortality. . . The black man has drunk of their life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed their immortality (Jemie 103).

Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

For Hughes, Africa is like the walloping tom-toms in "Danse Africaine": "And the low beating of the tom-toms/Stirs your blood" (14-15).

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