Harlem Renaissance Poets

Harlem Renaissance Poets

Felicia Ann Dortch

World Culture 11

December 3, 2013

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. The Movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the Great Migration, of which Harlem was the largest. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, in addition, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid-1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African-American middle class and to whites. Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. First published in The Crisis in 1921, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which became Hughes's signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues. Hughes's life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I danced in the Nile when I was old

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...