Biography
1920s
First
published in The Crisis in 1921, the verse that would become Hughes’s signature
poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, appeared in his first book of poetry The
Weary Blues in 1926
The
Negro Speaks of Rivers
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.
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
