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Countee Cullen was a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual flourishing among Black Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. He is primarily known for his poetry, which often explores themes of race, identity, love, and faith.
- Red
Analysis (ai): The poem "Red" by Countee Cullen critiques...
- Heritage
Mad Professor - Countee Cullen is a superb poet and his...
- Nocturne
Analysis (ai): This poem explores the desire for comfort and...
- Incident
Analysis (ai): "Incident" by Countée Cullen is a brief yet...
- The Wakeupworld
Its whimsical subject matter sets it apart from Cullen's...
- For Paul Laurence Dunbar
Analysis (ai): This tribute by a later Black poet to an...
- Titles List
We would like to show you a description here but the site...
- Tableau
was Countee Cullen really homosexual? on May 18 2010 07:20...
- Red
- Incident. Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean. Keep looking straight at me. ... Read Poem.
- A Brown Girl Dead. With two white roses on her breasts, White candles at head and feet, Dark Madonna of the grave she rests; Lord Death has found her sweet.
- Heritage. What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black. ... Read Poem.
- The Loss Of Love. All through an empty place I go, And find her not in any room; The candles and the lamps I light. Go down before a wind of gloom.
- Synopsis
- Education
- Philosophy
- Controversy
- Themes
- Analysis
- Background
- Criticism
- Writing
- Later years
- Legacy
- Assessment
Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American firmament and then sank toward the horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in 1918, the 15-year-old Countee LeRoy Porter was tak...
While Cullens informal education was shaped by his exposure to black ideas and yearnings, his formal education derived from almost totally white influences. This dichotomy heavily influenced his creative work and his criticism, particularly because he did extremely well at the white-dominated institutions he attended and won the approbation of whit...
Because of Cullens success in both black and white cultures, and because of his romantic temperament, he formulated an aesthetic that embraced both cultures. He came to believe that art transcended race and that it could be used as a vehicle to minimize the distance between black and white peoples. When he chose as his models poet John Keats and to...
A paradox exists, however, between Cullens philosophy and writing. While he argued that racial poetry was a detriment to the color-blindness he craved, he was at the same time so affronted by the racial injustice in America that his own best verseindeed most of his versegave voice to racial protest. In fact the title of Cullens collection, Color (1...
Of the six identifiable racial themes in Cullens poetry, the first is Négritude, a pervasive international black literary movement, which included what scholar Arthur P. Davis in a 1953 Phylon essay called the alien-and-exile theme. Specific examples of this motif in Cullens poetry include his attribution of descent from African kings to the girl f...
Using a sixth motif, Cullen exhibits a direct expression of irrepressible anger at racial unfairness. His outcry is more muted than that of some other Harlem Renaissance poetsHughes, for example, and Claude McKaybut that is a matter of Cullens innate and learned gentility. Those who overlook Cullens strong indictment of racism in American society m...
After 1929 Cullens production of verse dropped off dramatically. It was limited to his translation of Euripides play Medea, which appeared along with some new poems in his collection The Medea, and Some Poems (1935) and later with half a dozen previously unpublished pieces that were included in his posthumously published collection, On These I Stan...
While his supporters continued to defend him on racial rather than literary grounds, his detractors gradually increased in numbers with the publication of each successive collection of his poetry. Harry Alan Potamkin, in a 1927 New Republic review of Copper Sun, found that Cullen had not really progressed since Color and that the poet had capitaliz...
For a combination of causes, then, beginning in the early 1930s Cullen largely curtailed his poetic output and channeled his creative energy into other genres. He wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), but its poor critical reception made it his only novel. The book reveals a flair for satire in its secondary plot, which centers around the Harlem...
Toward the end of his life, in the 1940s, Cullen was relatively successful as a dramatist. With another collaborator, Owen Dodson, he worked on several projects, including The Third Fourth of July, a one-act play printed in Theatre Arts in August, 1946. During this period Cullen rejected a professorship at Fisk University and instead remained in Ne...
But as Cullen argued, the play really deals with human virtueshonor, love, decency, and loyalty. The controversy rounding it wore on, however, until 1946. In March of that year, St. Louis Woman finally premiered on Broadway, featuring songs by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen such as Come Rain, Come Shine and making singer Pearl Bailey a star. Unfort...
The limitations of Cullens poetry such as its archaic and imitative ring, its occasional verbosity, and its tendency to sacrifice sense for conventional prosody restricted his literary status to that of a minor poet with a real lyrical gift. But he was not guilty of the obsequious acceptance of white values for which 1960s black power poets such as...
By Countee Cullen. (For Harold Jackman) What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black. Women from whose loins I sprang. When the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed. From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?
Countee Cullen. 1903 –. 1946. Love, leave me like the light, The gently passing day; We would not know, but for the night, When it has slipped away. So many hopes have fled, Have left me but the name. Of what they were. When love is dead, Go thou, beloved, the same. Go quietly; a dream. When done, should leave no trace.
Yet Do I Marvel. To struggle up a never-ending stair. What awful brain compels His awful hand. To make a poet black, and bid him sing! Copyright Credit: Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” from Color. Copyright 1925 by Harper & Brothers, NY. Renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen.
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Flaunt a red flower. In the face of time. And only an hour. Time gives, then snap. Goes the flower, And dried is the sap. Juice of the first. Grapes of my vine, I proffer your thirst.
