206 Poetry for Students
world civilization. Let them look back on a golden
heritage, Hughes seems to say; let them speak of
these rivers that are so much a part of that heritage.
Source:Chloe Bolan, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Dean Rader
Dean Rader has published widely in the field
of twentieth-century poetry. In his essay he explores
the connections between Hughes and Walt Whit-
man.In his poem, “I, Too,” Hughes both implicitly
and explicitly responds to the great poet of free-
dom and democracy, Walt Whitman. Hughes’
opening lines recalls Whitman’s “I Hear America
Singing,” “Still Though the One I Sing” and even
Song of Myself.Hughes’ poem suggests that he, the
Negro, the “Other,” can also sing of and for Amer-
ica. A similar notion is at work in Hughes’ famous
poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In this poem,
Hughes invokes the technique and spirit of Whit-
man yet again in an attempt to write a lyric that
carries both public and private significance. Like
Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Hughes constructs
a poem that not only connects the individual to the
land, to particular geographical places but also to
history and to a distinctive culture, making the
poem, like the river itself, a vehicle by which one
flows through one space into another.Perhaps the first formal signpost to Whitman
is Hughes’ use of the first person singular. Of
course, poets have been using the first person for
centuries, but Whitman and Hughes both use the
lyric “I” in ways unlike other poets. For one thing,
the “I” in the poems does not really stand for the
literal, biographical human beings Walt Whitman
and Hughes. In Song of Myself,for instance, Whit-
man writes early on that he is in “perfect health,”
but we know now that he was not always in par-
ticularly good health. In fact, he was often in poor
health. And, it is unlikely that he literally sent his
barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, though
he might have done a good deal of yelling. Simi-
larly, the biographical figure, Hughes, did not build
his hut near the Congo, as he says in the poem, nor
did he participate in the construction of the pyra-
mids in Egypt. In both poems, the poets use the
lyric persona to let the individual stand for many,
or, to be more precise, to stand for everyone. In
line two of Song of Myself,Whitman writes, “And
what I assume you shall assume / For every atom
belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In this
poem, Whitman lays the groundwork for Hughes;
he establishes the ability for the lyric “I” to stand
for both the individual and society. So, in “The Ne-
gro Speaks of Rivers,” when Hughes writes, “I
bathed in the Euphrates,” or “I heard the singing of
the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to
New Orleans,” he is not speaking autobiographi-
cally, he is speaking metaphorically. He has not
done these things himself; he has done them
through others. Through a poetic and cultural con-
nection to these places and to history, he has par-
ticipated in important events for African and
African-American citizens.
This African and African-American thematic
in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” distinguishes
Hughes’ poem from Whitman’s water poems and,
for that matter, Song of Myself.Where Whitman’s
texts aggressively attempt to subsume all readers
and certainly all Americans, Hughes’ trajectory is
more narrow. His poem rises out of a decidedly
African-American concern. At no point in the poem
does he mention Boston or England or Plymouth
Rock. Instead, he positions the poem amidst an
overtly African and African-American landscape,
in particular, the rivers of Africa and the deep
South. Hughes uses the metaphor of the river, of a
river’s origin, to comment on his own origin and
the origin of black experiences across the globe. It
is possible that Hughes is suggesting a kind of
shared cultural memory—N. Scott Momaday, the
great American-Indian writer, claims he has aThe Negro Speaks of RiversLike Whitman in
“Song of Myself,” Hughes
constructs a poem that not
only connects the
individual to the land, to
particular geographical
places but also to history
and to a distinctive culture,
making the poem, like the
river itself, a vehicle by
which one flows through
one space into another.”