THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS

By Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow

of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went

down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn

all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

1922

On "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

Arnold RampersadThe sun was setting as the train reached St. Louis and began the long passage from Illinois across the Mississippi and into Missouri, where Hughes had been born. The beauty of the hour and the setting--the great muddy river glinting in the sun, the banked and tinted summer clouds, the rush of the train toward the dark, all touched an adolescent sensibility tender after the gloomy day. The sense of beauty and death, of hope and despair, fused in his imagination. A phrase came to him, then a sentence. Drawing an envelope from his pocket, he began to scribble. In a few minutes Langston had finished a poem.

. . .

With its allusions to deep dusky rivers, the setting sun, sleep, and the soul, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is suffused with the image of death and, simultaneously, the idea of deathlessness. As in Whitman's philosophy, only the knowledge of death can bring the primal spark of poetry and life. Here Langston Hughes became "the outsetting bard," in Whitman's phrase, the poet who sings of life because at last he has known death. Balanced between the knowledge of love and of death, the poetic will gathers force. From the depths of grief the poet sweeps back to life by clinging to his greatest faith, which is in his people and his sense of kinship with them. His frail, intimidated self, as well as the image of his father, are liquidated. A man-child is born, soft-spoken, almost casual, yet noble and proud, and black as Africa. The muddy river is his race, the primal source out of which he is born anew; on that "muddy bosom" of the race as black mother, or grandmother, he rests secure forever. The angle of the sun on the muddy water is like the angle of a poet's vision, which turns mud into gold. The diction of the poem is simple and unaffected either by dialect or rhetorical excess; its eloquence is like that of the best of the black spirituals.

From Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 1988. Copyright by Arnold Rampersad.

Onwuchekwa Jemie"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is perhaps the most profound of these poems of heritage and strength. Composed when Hughes was a mere 17 years old, and dedicated to W. E. B. DuBois, it is a sonorous evocation of transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory. The rivers are part of God's body, and participate in his immortality. They are the earthly analogues of eternity: deep, continuous, mysterious. They are named in the order of their association with black history. The black man has drunk of their life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed their immortality. He and the rivers have become one. The magical transformation of the Mississippi from mud to gold by the sun's radiance is mirrored in the transformation of slaves into free men by Lincoln's Proclamation (and, in Hughes's poems, the transformation of shabby cabarets into gorgeous palaces, dancing girls into queens and priestesses by the spell of black music). As the rivers deepen with time, so does the black man's soul; as their waters ceaselessly flow, so will the black soul endure. The black man has seen the rise and fall of civilizations from the earliest times, seen the beauty and death-changes of the world over the thousands of years, and will survive even this America. The poem's meaning is related to Zora Neale Hurston's judgment of the mythic High John de Conquer, whom she held as a symbol of the triumphant spirit of black America: that John was of the "Be" class. "Be here when the ruthless man comes, and be here when he is gone." In a time and place where black life is held cheap and the days of black men appear to be numbered, the poem is a majestic reminder of the strength and fullness of history, of the source of that life which transcends even ceaseless labor and burning crosses.

From Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright 1976 by Columbia University Press.

Jean WagnerHughes's first poem, published in The Crisis in June, 1921, attracted the attention it did precisely because its author revealed the acute sensitivity to the racial past that Garvey, with his racial romanticism, was then trying to instill in the minds of all. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" heralded the existence of a mystic union of Negroes in every country and every age. It pushed their history back to the creation of the world, and credited them with possessing a wisdom no less profound than that of the greatest rivers of civilization that humanity had ever known, from the Euphrates to the Nile and from the Congo to the Mississippi. . . .

Yet unlike Countee Cullen, and perhaps because he was the only poet of the Negro Renaissance who had a direct, rather disappointing contact with Africa, Hughes rarely indulges in a gratuitous idealization of the land of his ancestors. If, in spite of everything, the exaltation of African atavism has a significant place in his poetry up to 1931, the reason is merely that he had not yet discovered a less romantic manner that would express his discomfort at not being treated in his own country as a citizen on a par with any other. If he celebrates Africa as his mother, it is not only because all the black peoples originated there but also because America, which should be his real mother, had always behaved toward him in stepmotherly fashion.

From Black Poets of the United States. Copyright 1973 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

George HutchinsonHughes had come to Whitman by way of such Midwestern rebels as Carl Sandburg prior to the twenties. His was the democratic "transnational," socialist, "comradely" Whitman pushed by Horace Traubel and the Masses circle (as opposed to the Whitman of "cosmic consciousness" Toomer responded to). Nonetheless, he early sensed the affinity between the inclusive "I" of Whitman and the "I" of the spirituals, whose fusion shaped one of his first published poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" . . . .

Readers rarely notice that if the soul of the Negro in this poem goes back to the Euphrates, it goes back to a pre-"racial" dawn and a geography far from Africa that is identified with neither blackness nor whiteness--a geography at the time of Hughes's writing considered the cradle of all the world's civilizations and possibly the location of the Garden of Eden. Thus, even in this poem about the depth of the Negro's soul Hughes avoids racial essentialism while nonetheless stressing the existential, racialized conditions of black and modern identity.

From The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Copyright 1995 by the President and Board of Fellows of Harvard College.

Joyce A. JoyceHughes captures the African American's historical journey to America in what is perhaps his signature poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Dedicated to W E. B. Du Bois and using water or the river as a metaphor for the source of life, the poem traces the movement of black life from the Euphrates and Nile rivers in Africa to the Mississippi. Hughes subtly couches his admonishment of slavery and racism in the refrain "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." The first time the line appears in the poem it follows the poet's assertion that he has known rivers "ancient as the world and older than the flow of / human blood in human veins." The poet here identifies himself and his blackness with the first human beings. The second and only other time the line appears in the poem occurs after the poet has made reference to Mississippi, New Orleans, and Abe Lincoln. He places the lines "My soul has grown deep like the rivers" at the end of the poem, this time suggesting that he is no longer the same man who "bathed in the Euphrates" and "built [his] hut near the Congo." He is now a black man who has experienced the pain of slavery and racism, and his soul now bears the imprint of these experiences.

From "Bantu, Nkodi, Ndungu, and Nganga: Language, Politics, Music, and Religion in African American Poetry." In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. Ed. Joanne V. Gabbins. Copyright 1999 by the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia.

Adrian OktenbergThe identification of Hughes as a folk poet obscures the fact that he is a brilliant poet of ideas, and radical ideas at that. The concepts of negritude and soul, the politics of Black Power, the psychology of black rage, are so familiar to children of the sixties that it comes almost as a shock to realize that Hughes was presenting articulate and concrete images of them in his poetry in the twenties and thirties. While these ideas did not originate with him, he embodied them in verse of such fluency and power that it seems undated half a century later. Moreover, he consistently combined them with the basic premises of revolutionary socialism, and this sympathy is evident--hard to miss--in his work not only of the thirties but to the end of his life.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," then, is only the beginning of a long chain of poems by Hughes which confront, distill, extend, and transform the historical experience of black people into an art both limpid and programmatic. As in all of Hughes' hallmark poems, its distillation is as extreme as any in Issa's haiku. The "I" of the poem is not that of "a" Negro but "the" Negro, suggesting the whole of the people and their history. Most of the consonants--d's, n's, l's, s'sare soft, and of the vowels, long o's reoccur, contributing by sound the effect of an ancient voice. The tone of the repeated declarative sentences is muted, lulling. Every element of the poem combines to suggest that when the Negro speaks of rivers it is with the accumulated wisdom of a sage. The function of a sage is to impart the sometimes secret but long accumulated history of a people to its younger members so that they might make the lessons of the past active in the future. This impartation occurs in the central stanza of the poem:

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

Moving by suggestion, by naming particular rivers and particular activities performed nearby, the poem implicates the whole history of African and American slavery without ever articulating the word. "I bathed in the Euphrates" and "I built my hut near the Congo" are the normal activities of natural man performed in his natural habitat. That may be an unnecessarily anthropological way of putting it, but the lines are the equivalent of the speaker having said, "I made my life undisturbed in the place where I lived." The shift--and the lesson--occurs in the next two lines. Raising the pyramids above the Nile was the act of slaves, and if ever "Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans," it would have been in the context of American slavery and the Civil War. Implicit in the history of a people who had first been free and then enslaved is the vision of freedom regained, and therein lies the program. The final line of the poem, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," suggests wisdom in the word "deep." The wisdom imparted by the poem, beyond the memory of the suffering of slavery, includes a more deeply embedded memory of freedom. This is perhaps the more powerful memory, or the more sustaining one, and even if deferred, will reemerge in one form or another.

From "From the Bottom Up: Three Radicals of the Thirties." In A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry. Ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. Copyright 1987 by The University of Georgia Press.

R. Baxter MillerThe double identification with penetrative time and receptive timelessness appears perhaps most notably in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (Crisis, June 1921), a poem dedicated to the late W. E. B. Du Bois. "Rivers" presents the narrator's skill in retracing known civilization back to the source in East Africa. Within thirteen lines and five stanzas, through the suggestion of wisdom by anagoge, we re-project ourselves into aboriginal consciousness. Then the speaker affinns the spirit distilled from human history, ranging from 3000 B.C. through the mid-nineteenth century to the author himself at the brink of the Harlem Renaissance. The powerful repetend "I've known rivers. / Ancient, dusky rivers" closes the human narrative in nearly a circle, for the verse has turned itself subtly from an external focus to a unified and internal one: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." Except for the physical and spiritual dimensions, the subjective "I" and the "river" read the same.

When the Euphrates flows from eastern Turkey southeast and southwest into the Tigris, it recalls the rise as well as the fall of the Roman Empire. For over two thousand years the water helped delimit that domain. Less so did the Congo, which south of the Sahara demarcates the natural boundaries between white and Black Africa. The latter empties into the Atlantic ocean; the Nile flows northward from Uganda into the Mediterranean; in the United States the Mississippi River flows southeast from north central Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Whether north or south, east or west, "River" signifies the fertility as well as the dissemination of life in concentric half-circles. The liquid, as the externalized form of the contemplative imagination, has both depth and flow. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" reclaims the origins in Africa of both physical and spiritual humanity.

From The Art and Language of Langston Hughes. Copyright 1989 by The University Press of Kentucky.

Rachel Blau DuplessisThe Congo, called by Lindsay the "Mistrel River," and astir with cannibals and witch-doctors, is reinterpreted as a pastoral, nourishing, maternal setting in Hughes: "I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep." "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was composed in 1920 on the train to Mexico when Hughes was still in his teens (eighteen to be exact), and published a year later in Crisis. This poem was written as an internal dialogue with his father whose "strange dislike of his own people" baffled and disturbed Hughes, and, of course, implicated his son as object of that dislike (Hughes 1940, 54-56; Rampersand 1986, 37-40). In this poem, Hughes joins affirmative blackness to a universal human quest, by putting into a global context the racial stresses and demands of the United States.

The poem (as is well known) lists four key rivers, all "ancient as the world (Hughes 1926, 51; dedicated in Weary Blues to W. E. B. Du Bois). Three of the four flow through regions of colored peoples; they are "rivers in our past"the word "our" is marked (Hughes 1940, 55). The fourth is a river still reverberating with the past hundred years of American history; it is the river on which, Hughes says, Lincoln "had seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from American life (ibid.). With an "I" strongly indebted to Whitman as mediated by Sandburg, and with a diction drawn from spirituals, Hughes describes the the Mississippi down which he was traveling as he wrote the poem, as having a strong racialized meaning both by its often brown appearance ("Ive seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset"), by the possibility of a cross-race mixing or single-race affirmation of different colors ("muddy" turns more "golden" -- a word appearing in "The Congo" as well), and by its historical meaning under slavery.

Thus Hughes journey doubles Lincolns, and the concern with slavery, in the context of Hughes relationship with his father discloses a crisis of autonomy on a personal level, and a political rejection of a black man identifying with whites, for a white man (Lincoln) identifying with blacks. In contrast to the voyeuristic fantasies of "The Congo," this poem is a statement about vocation, an emancipation into blackness: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers" (Hughes 1926, 51).

From Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. 2001 Cambridge University Press.

Return to Langston Hugheshttp://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/Hughes/rivers.htmNotes on Poetry:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers (Themes)

Themes

Heritage

The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Hughes first published poem, introduces a theme which would recur in several other works throughout his career. Many critics have classified this group as the heritage poems. Amazingly, although it was composed very quickly when he was only seventeen, it is both polished and powerful. In fact, in Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry, Onwuchekwa Jemie labels it the most profound of this group.

The poem utilizes four of the worlds largest and most historically prominent rivers as a metaphor to present a view, almost a timeline in miniature, of the African-American experience throughout history. The opening lines of the poem introduce the ancient and powerful cultural history of Africa and West Asia, with the mention of the Euphrates and the dawn of time. Next the Congo, mother to Central Africa, lulls the speaker, to sleep. The worlds longest river, the powerful and complex Nile with its great pyramids, follows. Last, the poem moves to more recent times, with the introduction of the Mississippi. Even though the Mississippi and Congo both hold bitter connotations of the slave trade, each of the four has contributed to the depth of the speakers soul. The poem stresses triumph over adversity as the muddy bosom of the Mississippi turns golden.

The speaker clearly represents more than Langston Hughes, the individual. In fact, the I of the poem becomes even more than the embodiment of a racial identity. The poem describes, underlying that identity, an eternal spirit, existing before the dawn of time and present still in the twentieth century. The different sections of the poem emphasize this: the speaker actually functions on two levels. One is the human level. The first words of lines five through eight create a picture of the speakers ancestors: bathing, building, looking, hearing. However, the poem also discusses a spiritual level where the soul of the speaker has been and continues to be enriched by the spirit of the river, even before the creation of humanity. Thus, the second and third lines of the poem develop an eternal, or cosmic, dimension in the poem.

Wisdom and Strength

The poems cosmic dimension adds an additional theme making the poem more than a tribute to the heritage of the past. It honors the wisdom and strength which allowed African-Americans to survive and flourish in the face of all adversity, most particularly the last few centuries of slavery. Hughes associates this strength with the spirit of these rivers which Jemie describes in Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry as transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory. Jemie continues by noting that as the black man drank of these essences, he became endowed with the strength, the power and the wisdom of the river spirit. Thus Hughes stresses the ancient cultural heritage of the African-American, the soul which existed even before the dawns were young. The poem then makes clear that through all of the centuries, the speaker or in other words, the collective soul has survived indomitable, like the rivers. The poem exalts the force of character, the wisdom and strength, which created this survival.

This tribute developed out of Hughes personal life. He describes the inspiration for the poem in his autobiography, The Big Sea. While he was crossing the Mississippi on a visit to his father, a man who baffled and frustrated Hughes because of his prejudice, he began thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. Hughes contrasts this attitude with his own admiration for the bravest people possible the Negroes from the Southern ghettoes facing tremendous odds. The Mississippi suddenly seemed to be a graphic symbol of that bravery. He notes that being sold down the river literally meant being torn violently from ones own family. Yet even after centuries of brutal inhumanity in bondage, the African-American spirit has emerged triumphant. This poem became Hughes tribute to the strength and the wisdom of his people.

Rivers

Rivers have been a powerful force throughout human history. Many early mythologies made the river or the river god a symbol of both life and death. It is easy to understand the reason for this since most of the great early civilizations grew up in river valleys. The Euphrates, which is the first of the rivers mentioned in the poem, helps to form Mesopotamia. Even today, world history textbooks refer to the area using the symbolic phrase, the cradle of civilization, because of the number of ancient kingdoms which flourished there: Ur, Sumer, Babylon. The Nile, too, played a central role in early civilization. It ensured Egyptian prosperity. Thus the river was worshipped as the god, Khnum, who made the earth fruitful. Central African tribes also believed in the powerful river spirits who were sources of life, wisdom, and purification. Even, today, Christian baptism, which originated when John the Baptist anointed Jesus Christ in the River Jordan, represents both a symbol of purification and the entrance to new life.

S. Okechukwu Mezu discusses the importance of rivers in both mythology and poetry in his study The Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor: The river in most societies is considered a source of life, of new life in particular: a source of ablution and purification. He then mentions several poets who absorb this view into their work, such as Hughes and Whitman, whose personification of the river is not far removed from the anthropomorphism and pantheism that characterize certain elements in African traditional religion.

Topics for Further Study

Rivers were vital to early civilizations, yet today many suffer from a variety of types of pollution. Choose one of the rivers mentioned in the poem and report on its current condition.

Research the importance of the Harlem Renaissance in giving voice to the soul of the African-American community.

Investigate Abraham Lincolns role in abolishing slavery.

Hughes connects the African-American soul with rivers. Write an extended metaphor connecting your spirit to some aspect of nature.

About "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

Many writers and poets have written about the importance of Langston Hughes' poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Here is one brief essay by Onwuchekwa Jemie.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is perhaps the most profound of these poems of heritage and strength. Composed when Hughes was a mere 17 years old, and dedicated to W. E. B. DuBois, it is a sonorous evocation of transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory. The rivers are part of God's body, and participate in his immortality. They are the earthly analogues of eternity: deep, continuous, mysterious. They are named in the order of their association with black history. The black man has drunk of their life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed their immortality. He and the rivers have become one. The magical transformation of the Mississippi from mud to gold by the sun's radiance is mirrored in the transformation of slaves into free men by Lincoln's Proclamation (and, in Hughes's poems, the transformation of shabby cabarets into gorgeous palaces, dancing girls into queens and priestesses by the spell of black music). As the rivers deepen with time, so does the black man's soul; as their waters ceaselessly flow, so will the black soul endure. The black man has seen the rise and fall of civilizations from the earliest times, seen the beauty and death-changes of the world over the thousands of years, and will survive even this America. The poem's meaning is related to Zora Neale Hurston's judgment of the mythic High John de Conquer, whom she held as a symbol of the triumphant spirit of black America: that John was of the "Be" class. "Be here when the ruthless man comes, and be here when he is gone." In a time and place where black life is held cheap and the days of black men appear to be numbered, the poem is a majestic reminder of the strength and fullness of history, of the source of that life which transcends even ceaseless labor and burning crosses.

From Langston Hughes: An Introduction to The Poetry. Copyright 1976 by Columbia University Press.

Poem Analysis of The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes

Throughout Langston Hughes poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers the theme of roots is prominent and this theme gives rise to the ultimate meaning of the poem, even though the word "roots" itself is not used in the text. The textual details of the poem invoke strong imagery related to veins, rivers, and the roots of trees and give the reader a sense of the timelessness of these objects. Furthermore, through his use of language and images, Langston Hughes is able to create two meanings for the theme of roots since on the one hand they refer to the deep roots like trees have as well as roots in the historical and familial sense. Through these images and details, the reader begins to understand the complexity of the poem and it is clear that it addresses themes that are much larger than simply rivers or human veinsit is a statement on the whole of African-American history as it has flourished along rivers, which gave life and allowed human veins and firm historical roots.In the short first stanza, the speaker in the poem by Langston Hughes states that he has known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. From this early point in the point in the poem, images of the canals of veins that run throughout the human body as well as similar images of rivers that wind around and are shaped like veins form our understanding that this poem is about more than blood or water, it is about roots and circuits. Like veins or rivers, roots run deep and twist irregularly through the medium in which they are planted. The ancient rivers the speaker talks of are like the blood in veins or the roots under trees because they provide sustenance and can give and support life. This is later supported when the speaker discusses early civilizations that thrived off the river system, thus the theme of roots has a dual meaning. Although that will be addressed, it is important to point out that after the first stanza there is a sentence that stands by itself for emphasis that simply states in one of the more important lines in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes, My soul has grown deep like the rivers. This stand-alone line prefaces the issues that will be discussed in the following lines and makes the reader see that rivers are not like the long probing roots of a tree or human veins, but rivers are similar to the soul and, like Hughes' quest for identity, never ending. When the speaker says that his soul is deep like the rivers, he is saying that because of this almost organic connection with the earth, he thrives and can understand. It is also significant that he says his soul has grown deep like the rivers since the idea that it grows further emphasizes the organic nature of knowledge and ones soul. Like tree roots that extend far into the earth, the speaker is nourished by roots, both in physical terms (the rivers and human veins) as well as in the metaphorical sense.The third section changes the tone of the poem since it reverts to the first-person perspective. Although the reader knows it is impossible for one person to have lived in so many places and time periods at once, it is understood that the I being used is meant to represent hundreds of thousands of voices from the past to the present. The speaker says, I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young / I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled it me to sleep which makes the reader aware that the ancient rivers spoken of before are the roots both in terms of history as well as physically. The theme of rivers is continued in the following lines where the speaker details looking along the Nile and then hearing singing in Mississippi and New Orleans and it is clear that these are locations of particular importance in African and African-American history. The speaker seems to be equating survival with the rivers since, like veins and roots, the rivers provide nutrients (also in the metaphorical sense) necessary to survival and growth. Underlying all of these statements about rivers is the theme of roots. These rivers are all in separate locations and though they are like individual trees with separate root systems, they are of the same variety and can support and give life. Along with this idea is the fact that the roots of African and African-American history are not only within the people or the overarching soul of a group of people, but that they are within the souls that have grown deep like the rivers they have thrived along for centuries.After the speaker has highlighted the many rivers important to the roots of the souls of people, there is another line break, which seems to be separated for added emphasis. The speaker states, Ive known rivers / Ancient, dusky rivers and the whole theme of the roots of knowing and understanding are brought full circle. Just as when the speaker said his soul had grown deep, in this separated section when he says, Ive known rivers he is making a reference to the roots of knowledge. Trees have been associated with knowledge from as early on as the Bible (the Tree of Knowledge) and the theme of roots he invokes here not only addresses the roots of history, circuits, and the soul, but also of knowledge and understanding. This knowledge he refers to is more akin to omniscient cultural knowledge and identity and the roots, which are fed by the metaphorical river and maintained by the human veins and bloodlines of generations. The speaker ends the poem with the repeated phrase, My soul has grown deep like the rivers and after reading the stanzas that followed after the first time he stated it, the meaning is both clearer and more complex since we realize so many issues of history, the soul, culture, and understanding are being discussed* If you are using this article as a study guide or as a resource for your own essays, please make sure to cite it as your source with proper citation, (even if you are just using a few important quotes or the same thesis statement or thesis statements) as this essay or article is copyrighted material. For a short summary of citation guides, please visit the MLA main website where tips and analysis on how to properly cite references can be found.*http://www.articlemyriad.com/179.htm