The Weary Blues

About this book

'I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.' In his first book of poems, Langston Hughes writes in the rhythms of jazz and the blues about the lives of Black Americans: a pianist playing the blues late at night on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, cabarets and dancers, working people, the dream of Africa, and the proud declaration 'I, too, sing America'.

Context and significance

Hughes (1901–1967) published the book in 1926, at twenty-four, after its title poem won a prize from the magazine Opportunity, and he became the best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' he bathes in the Euphrates 'when dawns were young' before the Congo, the Nile and the Mississippi. Compare Cane.

About the author