The Negro Speaks Of Rivers Dream Variations

The Tropics in New York

The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

• This poem is about describing the way rivers are like people and combine different people together because they carry the blood of the land and compares life in Africa and in America for blacks

Author of the poem

• The author is Langston Hughes• He was born in Missouri on February 1, 1902• He was raised by his grandmother until age 13, then

moved to Lincoln, IL• His poems were mostly about what life was like for blacks

in the mid-20th century• “I loved being down by the rivers when I was a young kid.

It’s the only place I can go to get away from everyone.“

Dream Variations

• This poem is about a guy who has a dream to be able to do what he wants and for people not to hate him just because of the color of his skin, so if he wants to dance during the day or work at night he can

Author of Dream variations

Langston Hughes was one of the most famous black American poets of the 20th century and also a social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of “jazz poetry”. He is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. A famously thing that he wrote about the period that "Harlem was in vogue."

The tropics in new York

• This poem is about how out of place and homesick he feels in New York city and how he found a place where they had bananas and mangoes and other things so that reminded him of where he grew up in his own country of Jamaica

Author of The Tropics in New York • Claude McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889. • He was educated by his older brother, who had a library of English

novels, poetry, and scientific books• At the age of twenty, he wrote a book called Songs of Jamaica

about what black life was like in Jamaica • In 1912, he travelled to the United States to attend Tuskegee

Institute. • In 1917, he wrote two sonnets, "The Harlem Dancer" and

"Invocation," and later used the same poetic form to write about what he thought about how unfair life was for blacks in America

• He also wrote about many other subjects, from his home in Jamaica to poems about love