431 Langston Hughes
The History of Literature
00:00
The Singing of the Mississippi River
Roland Martin: The black soul was there all along, listening, watching building, bathing. He says the poem compares a soul to rivers stretching back through historical time. Thereis a surface, and there's a whole lot underneath, history, wisdom, power,. Its sort of a a perfect poem in its way. Not formally perfect, necessarily, but there isn't a single word or single sound out of place. And we should say that hughes here owes a debt, perhaps, to walt whitman who stretched american poetry out of that rigidity, let it overflow those walls.
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