"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was first published in book form as part of the poetry collection Weary Blues in 1926. Though the book's initial print run was small, it received positive reviews from several respected publications. An unnamed reviewer for the New York Times remarks, "We sincerely hope that Langston Hughes will receive the wide reading he deserves." Du Bose Heyward, a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, calls the book "[a]lways intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense."

However, some reviewers felt that Hughes had clearly not yet reached his potential. A reviewer for the Independent notes, "Time may give more depth and beauty to his work, which is crude in texture and lacking in distinction." In the London Times Literary Supplement, an unnamed reviewer dismisses the weight of Hughes's works with these words: "Civilization merely...