Langston Hughes' Poem Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Langston Hughes Poem - Essay ExampleIn Rivers, Hughes claimed this legacy-vocabulary of place encompassing downriver, the term for all the fear places in the lower South to which slaves were sold off, the riverside, one of the relative safe havens and sites of resistance deep down the heavens of the plantation itself, and over Jordan, the beckoning frontier of freedom visible from inside the bounds of enslavement and exile as it was elaborated and interpreted in the nineteenth century in the traditional Negro spirituals and in such(prenominal) classic fugitive slave narratives as Frederick Douglasss and Harriet Jacobss as sites of meditation, rebellion, and recuperation. (R. Baxter Miller, 2005).By placing that inherited vocabulary of place within a wider geographic perspective, however, Hughes proposed a reconstituted imagery of place for the twentieth century, one associated with a progression crosswise continents in a historic and prophetic language of belonging and entitlem ent, beyond enslavement.