The poems “Yet Do I Marvel”, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, and “Tenebris” by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Angelina Grimké, respectively, reflect attitudes towards the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, which spanned the early twentieth century, brought about an explosion of African American culture that spread throughout the world. These poems use the figurative language techniques of allusion, personification, and imagery to reflect the ideas of many participants in the Harlem Renaissance, including revolution and unfairness.
The first of these poems, “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen, presents the idea of African Americans not being able to express their culture during the Harlem Renaissance through allusions to Greek mythology. In his poem, Cullen wishes that God would “Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus / Is baited by the fickle fruit” (Cullen 1275). In the Greek myth of Tantalus, Tantalus was sentenced to stand in neck deep water that he could not drink, with a bowl of fruit close by that he could not reach. Throughout history, African Americans had always been treated unfairly, always being known as a race inferior to others, and Cullen expresses the questioning feeling that African Americans had during the Harlem Renaissance through this allusion. They were confused as to why God was punishing them. Cullen goes on to ponder an idea: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (Cullen 1275). Literary critic Fred M. Fetrow, in his review of the poem in the Explicator, a literary review journal, explains his view of a black poet singing, claiming that “Any African American poet writing in 1925 would have found it difficult…to ‘sing’ of his blackness without...
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Cullen, Countee. “Yet Do I Marvel.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013. 1275. Print.
Fetrow, Fred M. “Cullen’s Yet Do I Marvel.” The Explicator 56.2 (1998): 103-105. Literary Reference Center. Web. 23 April 2014.
Grimké, Angelina. “Tenebris.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013. 1277. Print.
Haynes, Robert V. “The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Book Review).” American Historical Review 83.2 (1978): 554-555. Literary Reference Center. Web. 24 April 2014.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013. 1278. Print.
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2. The African American culture blossomed during the Harlem Renaissance, particularly in creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous
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To analyze Hughes’s poem thoroughly, by using Eliot’s argumentative essay, we must first identify the poem’s speaker and what is symbolic about the speaker? The title (“The Negro Speaks Of Rivers”) of the poem would hint off the speaker’s racial identity, as the word Negro represents the African-American race not only in a universal manner, but in it’s own individual sphere. T.S. Eliot’s essay, mentions that “every nation, every race, has not its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind”(549). In another sense, different societies have their own characteristics, however, with a racial mixture, shadowed elements can be formed. If one were to analyze in between the lines of Eliot’s essay and Hughes’s poem, he...
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes is a compelling poem in which Hughes explores not only his own past, but the past of the black race. As the rivers deepen over time, the Negro's soul does too; their waters eternally flow, as the black soul suffers.
Hughes, Langston. "Harlem." [1951] Literature. 5th ed. Eds. James H. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1027-28.
Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.