Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was born in the African American community of Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. He spent a year at Columbia University and became involved with the Harlem Renaissance movement but was shocked by the endemic racial prejudice at the university and subsequently left. Hughes traveled for several years, spending some time in Paris before returning to the United States. He completed his BA at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University in 1929, after which he returned to Harlem for the remainder of his life. Hughes was prolific in verse, prose, and drama. His first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. His first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. He is remembered for his celebration of the uniqueness of African American culture, which found expression in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), published in the Nation, and in the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was Langston Hughes’s first published poem—in the Crisis, in 1921—written when he was eighteen. It was later included in his first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926). Hughes dedicated it to activist and historian W. E. B. DuBois.

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

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

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

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bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

(1921)