The Harlem Renaissance Poets
XXX XXXX
Strayer University
HUM 112
August 17, 2014
XXX XXXX

The Harlem Renaissance Poets
The Harlem Renaissance, notably deemed as the “New Negro Movement” by Alain Locke, aggrandized the creativity in literature and music from the African American culture. Much of the art from this era mostly portrayed their experiences of inequality and their search for better quality of life in the North and Midwest, henceforth the Great Migration. Some of the most prominent names during this time was African American poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, both playing an essential role to the literary movement. As stated by McKay, “their poems are full of hushes, whispers, sighs, songs, tongues, throats, wails, moans, voices, speech, music, hymns, blues, sobs, cries, lashes, yowls, jazz, scatting, drums, thunder, drones, shouts, trumpets, trains, whistles, choirs, horns, and all sorts of other raucous sound” (1926). Langston Hughes was notably known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance and also deemed as the “Father of Harlem Renaissance poetry”. Hughes solidified his legacy in the Harlem Renaissance subsequently after the publishing of his first poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, which is one of his most notable poems. The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which was influenced from his time passing the Mississippi River to visit his family, was later published in 1926 in his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. In regards to the poem, Phillipson describes it as “grounding itself specifically in a diasporic consciousness that embraces the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile as rivers of Black geography” (2006). Another notable poem from Hughes was “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” which was published in The Nation in 1926. The poem took aim at African American artists who seemed to be accommodating to be more accepted.