Countee Cullen – An Authoritative, Prolific and Strident Poetic Voice From the Harlem Renaissance

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Countee Cullen an American Romantic poet following the mannequin of the English Romantic poet, John Keats, was one of many main African American poets of his time, related to the technology of black poets of the Harlem Renaissance amongst whose ranks was Claude Mckay, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Melvin Tolson and Arna Bontemps. As a number one determine within the group he together with Langston Hughes produced the primary massive physique of labor in the US written by African People. Nonetheless, Cullen in contrast to the others thought of poetry raceless, though his ‘The Black Christ’ took a racial theme, lynching of a black youth for against the law he didn’t commit.     

I doubt not God is sweet, well-meaning, variety,    

And did He stoop to quibble may inform why    

The little buried mole continues blind,    

Why flesh that mirrors Him should sometime die,    

Make plain the explanation tortured Tantalus    

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare    

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus    

To wrestle up a endless stair.    

Inscrutable His methods are, and immune    

To catechism by a thoughts too strewn    

With petty cares to barely perceive    

What terrible brains compels His terrible hand.    

But do I marvel at this curious factor:    

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!    

(‘But Do I Marvel’)   

The Black Christ and Different Poems, was accomplished beneath the Guggenheim Fellowship, and revealed in 1929 whereas he was overseas. .  The title poem was criticized for its use of Christian spiritual imagery -in evaluating the lynching of a black man to Christ’s crucification.   

Countee Cullen born Countee LeRoy Porter deserted by his mother and father at delivery, was raised by his paternal grandmother, Mrs. Elizabeth Porter.    

 It’s unclear the place he was truly born. Some sources say he was born in Louisville, Kentucky, while others say Baltimore. Later in his life, Cullen stated he was born in New York Metropolis. However Louisville looks like the most definitely birthplace because it was Louisville, the place his mom died in 1940, he persistently named as his birthplace in his youth and which he wrote on his registration kind for New York College.  

All through his unstable childhood his actual mom Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. by no means tried to contact him, solely making an attempt to take action till someday within the Twenties, after he’d develop into well-known. The title of his father isn’t recognized.  

His grandmother Elizabeth Porter introduced younger Countee to Harlem when he was 9. and enrolled him in Public College Quantity 27 within the Bronx, New York, beneath the title of Countee  L. Porter nonetheless residing along with her in 1916.

Shortly after she died in October 1917 Cullen was adopted on the age of 15 by the Reverend Frederick Ashbury Cullen, an influential minister who was the pastor at Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, one of many largest church buildings there at the moment and raised as a Methodist.  Countee went to stay with this Reverend and his spouse, the previous Carolyn Belle Mitchell. Although Countee was by no means formally adopted, he later claimed the Cullens as his pure mother and father and in 1918 assumed the title Countee P. (Porter) Cullen and in 1925 dropping the center preliminary.  

Countee Cullen established an enviable popularity as an impressive scholar in each college he attended. With the assistance of Reverend Cullen, he attended the celebrated revered, Dewitt Clinton Excessive College for boys in Manhattan in 1918. A faculty primarily of all white, male college students, DeWitt Clinton was thought of to be one of many most interesting public colleges in New York on the time to which only a few African-American college students have been enrolled.    

Younger Countee not solely did very effectively in class however was elected to class workplaces and gained many awards. He turned Vice President of his class throughout his senior yr. He served in an editorial capability on a number of of his college publications usually as an editor. He was affiliate editor of the 1921 Magpie, the varsity’s literary journal, and editor of the Clinton Information.  He was affiliated with the Arista Honor Society, the scholastic honor society. He served as treasurer of the Inter-Excessive College Poetry Society and as chairperson of the Senior Publications Committee.  He gained an oratorical contest sponsored by the movie actor Douglas Fairbanks  In his senior yr he acquired the Magpie Cup in recognition of his achievements.

His poetry which he had been writing since he was in elementary college appeared recurrently in class publications. He acquired wider public recognition in 1921 when his first revealed  poem , “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,”  appeared within the DeWitt Clinton Excessive College literary journal, The Magpie. His recognition was expanded when later that yr, it gained first prize in a citywide poetry contest sponsored by the Empire Federation of Ladies’s Golf equipment and his profitable stanzas extensively reprinted. He stored on profitable many extra poetry contests from a really younger age and infrequently had his profitable work reprinted.  

He acquired particular honors in Latin research in 1922. Upon commencement, he acquired distinctions in Latin, arithmetic, English, historical past and French.  

Cullen attended New York College on a New York State Regents scholarship. There his works attracted vital consideration. His poems have been revealed regularly within the college journal, The Arch, of which he finally turned poetry editor.   He revealed works in numerous literary magazines, together with Harpers, Century Journal, and Poetry.    

Additionally, his distinctive items for writing have been acknowledged with prizes from The Disaster, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alternative of the Nationwide City League. He graduated with honors in 1925 from New York College as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and was additionally initiated into Phi Beta Kappa honors society.  

Throughout his sophomore yr at school he gained first prize within the prestigious Witter Bynner Contest for undergraduate poetry in 1925. In Could  1925, he gained second prize within the Alternative literary contest run by Opportunity journal the literary organ of the Nationwide City League for his poem “To One Who Stated Me Nay.”  He was quickly nationally referred to as a poet.  

Quickly after, he  produced his first quantity of poems entitled Colour which gained him the Harmon Basis Award.  Printed the identical yr that he graduated from NYU it established him as the foremost poet of the Harlem Renaissance a motion centered within the cosmopolitan neighborhood of Harlem, in New York Metropolis in the course of the Twenties, when a contemporary technology of writers emerged, among the many main figures have been Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, and naturally Countee Cullen, a number one voice of the interval.  The motion was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.  Written in a cautious, conventional model, the work celebrated black magnificence and deplored the results of racism.  

The e-book included ‘Heritage’ and ‘Incident’, in all probability his most well-known poems. ‘But Do I Marvel’, about racial id and injustice, confirmed the affect of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake, however its topic was removed from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there’s God, and ‘God is sweet, well-meaning, variety’, however he finds a contradiction of his personal plight in a racist society: he’s black and a poet. Colour was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.  

Cullen in his senior yr at New York College, had already achieved nationwide fame. His poems had been revealed in Bookman, American Mercury, Harper’s, Century, Nation, Poetry, Disaster, the Messenger, Palms, and Alternative. He had gained second prize in 1923 within the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Contest sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. He positioned second in that contest once more in 1924 however gained first prize in 1925, when he additionally gained the John Reed Memorial Prize awarded by Poetry journal. In 1926 he acquired a grasp’s diploma from Harvard College and gained the Disaster journal award in poetry.  

Colour acquired common vital acclaim. Alain Locke wrote in Alternative (Jan. 1926): “Women and Gents! A genius! Posterity will snort at us if we don’t proclaim him now. COLOR transcends the entire limiting {qualifications} that may be introduced ahead if it have been merely a piece of expertise.” The quantity accommodates epitaphs, solely two of which might be thought of racial; love poems; and poems on different conventional topics. However the vital theme–as the title implies–was race, and it was the poems coping with racial topics that captured the eye of the critics.    

His second quantity of poetry, Copper Solar, revealed in 1927 additionally by Harper and Brothers as have been all his books, gained first prize in literature from the Harmon Basis. There are fewer racial poems on this assortment than in Colour, nonetheless, they categorical an anger that was not so pronounced within the earlier quantity. Nearly all of the poems right here cope with life and love and different conventional themes of nineteenth-century poetry.  

Cullen turned assistant editor for Alternative,”A Journal of Negro Life”   beneath Charles S. Johnson, in 1926 and  wrote editorials and a column known as “The Darkish Tower” which featured e-book critiques and articles which all elevated his literary popularity. . In his critiques and commentaries, he known as upon African-American writers to create a consultant and respectable race literature, while insisting that the African-American artist shouldn’t be sure by race or restricted to racial themes.  For, Cullen had maintained that he most popular to be referred to as a poet, not a “Negro poet.” Some Harlem Renaissance writers, together with Langston Hughes, considered this as an try and deny his race, a view lengthy held by some later students although a studying of his poetry reveals this unfounded. The truth is his main poems, and most of these nonetheless being printed in anthologies, have racial themes. Cullen expounded his view within the Brooklyn Eagle (10 Feb. 1924):  

If I’m going to be a poet in any respect, I’m going to be a POET and never a NEGRO POET. That is what has hindered the event of artists amongst us. Their one be aware has been the priority with their race. That’s all very effectively, none of us can get away from it. I can not at instances. You will note it in my verse. The consciousness of that is too poignant at instances. I can not escape it. However what I imply is that this: I shall not write of negro topics for the aim of propaganda. That isn’t what a poet is worried with. In fact, when the emotion rising out of the truth that I’m a negro is powerful, I categorical it. However that’s one other matter.  

He then pursued graduate research at Harvard College graduating with an M.A. diploma in 1926. Cullen acquired the Harmon Basis Literary Award in 1927 in addition to a Guggenheim Fellowship for examine overseas.  

Cullen’s productiveness all through the 1920’s earned him an immutable place within the Black cultural rebirth, the Harlem Renaissance. For he was already writing a number of the acclaimed poems revealed in books by Harper and Brothers: Colour (1925), Copper Solar (1927) The Ballad of the Brown Woman (1927) and The Black Christ (1929).Cullen’s poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Woman and Copper Solar explored comparable themes as Color, however they weren’t so effectively acquired.  

In April 1928, Cullen married Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois the main black mental and exponent of the “Gifted Tenth” idea, then at a really prestigious and vibrant ceremony. Du Bois rejoiced at bringing the younger genius into his household. The marriage was the social occasion of the last decade in Harlem. After a quick honeymoon in Philadelphia, Cullen left for Paris..   

Two months after the marriage, Cullen left for Europe along with his father and Harold Jackman a trainer whom the author Carl Van Vechten had used as mannequin in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926) with whom Cullen had developed a detailed friendship. His spouse adopted after a month.  

Cullen continued his literary productiveness even after the years of the Harlem Renaissance, however in additional various methods: enhancing the October 1926 particular problem of Palms dedicated to African-American poets, amassing and enhancing Caroling Nightfall , an anthology of poetry by African People in 1927 after which writing his solely novel, One Approach to Heaven which regardless of its satirical tone presents a “practical image of the New Negro Renaissance Harlem.” Cullen was by this time usually acknowledged because the main literary determine of the Harlem Renaissance. Gerald Early in My Soul’s Excessive Music (1991), Cullen’s collected writings, stated, “He was, certainly, a boy surprise, a younger good-looking black Ariel ascending, a boyish, brown-skinned titan who, within the early and mid-twenties, embodied lots of the hopes, aspirations, and maturing expressive potentialities of his individuals.”  

The yr 1928 was a watershed for Cullen. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship beneath which he traveled to France to review in Paris. Yolande who had been having an affair with a preferred band chief now had grounds to annill the wedding. She knowledgeable her father that Cullen had confessed that he was sexually drawn to males, Nina Yolande Du Bois then sued for divorce, which was obtained in Paris in 1930.  The third quantity of his poetry, The Ballad of a Brown Woman, was revealed.  

By 1929 Cullen had revealed 4 volumes of poetry.  As a lyric poet and never desirous to be thought of a “Negro” poet Cullen focused on themes on love and nature. Although he didn’t want to be categorized, however slightly to be appreciated as an artist who occurred to be of African descent,  but he wrote lovely verses with racial themes.  Such controversial views didn’t have an effect on his recognition.

He remained a lot in demand for lectures and readings by each white and black teams. In 1931 alone he learn his poetry and lectured in numerous establishments in seventeen states and Canada. A few of his poems have been set to music by Charles Marsh, Virgil Thomson, William Schuman, William Lawrence, Margaret Bonds, Clarence Cameron White, Emerson Whithorne, and Noel DaCosta.    

Being that royalties and lecture charges have been inadequate earnings for his subsistence, he searched for tutorial positions and was supplied professorships at Sam Huston Faculty, Dillard College, Fisk College, Tougaloo Faculty, and West Virginia State Faculty. There isn’t any clear clarification of why he didn’t settle for any of the positions. In 1932 he turned a substitute trainer in New York public colleges and have become a full-time trainer of English and French at Frederick Douglass   Junior Excessive College in 1934, a place he held till his dying  in New York Metropolis, and the place he taught and the place he was a extremely popular trainer who  impressed the long run novelist and essayist James Baldwin.   In addition to writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of different black writers.although he had declined a Inventive Literature invitation from Fisk College in Nashville.  

Cullen continued to put in writing and publish after 1928, however his works have been not universally acclaimed. His single novel, One Approach to Heaven , a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York Metropolis was revealed in 1932.His novel acquired little consideration from the critics. His stage adaptation of it was produced by a number of novice {and professional} theater teams however remained one in every of his a number of unpublished performs. Critics gave these works combined critiques at finest.  

Cullen’s popularity as a author rests on his poetry.  He rejected so-called jazz and free-style as inappropriate types of poetic expression. He was a romantic lyric poet and an excellent admirer of John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay basing his works on such Romantic poets, particularly Keats . As a poet Cullen was conservative. He didn’t ignore racial themes, , and infrequently used the standard sonnet kind. “Not writ in water nor in mist, / Candy lyric throat, thy title. / Thy singing lips that chilly dying kissed / Have seared his personal with flame.” (‘2. For John Keats, Apostle of Magnificence’)

Nonetheless, Cullen additionally loved Langston Hughes’s black jazz rhythms, however he beloved “the measured line and the skillful rhyme” of the nineteenth century poetry extra. After the early Thirties Cullen averted racial themes.

Cullen’s later publications embody On These I Stand (1947), a group of his favourite poems, and the play The Third Fourth of July (publ. 1946).Whereas his arch traditionalism and lack of originality in model had been seen in Colour as minor flaws, they got here to be considered as main deficiencies in his later works.  

In 1940, he married an previous buddy Ida Mae Roberson. They’d recognized one another for ten years and so they loved a contented and satisfying marriage.

Within the final years of his life Cullen wrote principally for the theatre. He collaborated with Arna Bontemps serving to her adapt her novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), which he entitled St. Louis Girl (1946, publ. 1971) for the musical stage with its rating composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, each white. St. Louis Girl opened on Broadway on 30 March 1946.

The Broadway musical, was set in a poor black neighborhood in St. Louis.  Though the manufacturing was opposed by Walter White of the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Folks and another civil rights activists as an unfavorable illustration of African People, it ran for 4 months and was revived a number of instances by amateurs and one skilled group between 1959 and 1980.

Cullen additionally translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides seven choruses of which have been set to music by Virgil Thompson. and the translated play revealed in The Medea and a few Poems (1935), with a group of sonnets and brief lyrics. 

He additionally wrote two works for younger readers: The Misplaced Zoo (1940), poems concerning the animals who perished within the Flood, and My Lives and the way I Misplaced Them, an autobiography of his cat. 

His one act play, The Third Fourth of July, introducing Pearl Bailey as Butterfly ran for 113 performances on the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway.

On January 9, 1946, Cullen abruptly died of a gastrointestinal dysfunction  occasioned by uremic poisoning and problems from hypertension. Though he died a comparatively younger man,  Cullen was thought of among the finest recognized poets of his time so was honored as essentially the most celebrated African American author. A set of a few of his finest work organized in On These I Stand , a group that he had chosen as his finest, was revealed posthumously in 1947.

Being for a while essentially the most celebrated African-American author within the nation and by many accounts one of many main voices of the Harlem Renaissance, public colleges in each Chicago and New York Metropolis have been named after him. The one hundred and thirty fifth Road Department of the New York Public Library was additionally named in honor of him in 1951. 

Additional Studying:   

1. Gerard Early. About Countee Cullen’s Life
2. UIUC Fashionable American Poetry
3. The New Negro by Alain Locke (1925)
4. Cullen and the Negro Renaissance by B. Fergusson (1966)
5. Native Sons by E. Margolies (1968)
6. A Bio-Bibliography of Countee Porter Cullen 1903-1946 by M. Perry (1971)
7. Black Poets of the US by J. Wagner (1973)
8. The Many-Coloured Coat of Desires: The Poetry of Countee Cullen by H.A. Baker, Jr. (1974)
9. Black Poetry in America by B. Jackson and L. Rubin (1974)
10. Harlem Renaissance by M. Perry (1982)
11. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr (1987)
12. ‘Countee Cullen: A Cautious Expertise’ in Nice Black Writers by Steven Otfinoski (1994)
13. World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 1, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996)
14. The Atlas of Literature, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (1996 – see chapter on Harlem Renaissance)
15. Important Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi, and Tutuola by Sydney E. Onyeberechi (1999)
16. .American Nationwide Biography On-line Countee Cullen, 1941.
17. Countee Cullen’s private papers (1921-1969, c. 4,400 manuscripts and pictures and thirty-nine volumes) within the Amistad Analysis
18. Middle at Tulane College; microfilm copies of that assortment are in different repositories.
19. The James Weldon Johnson Assortment in Beinecke Library at Yale College accommodates greater than 900 letters written by and to Cullen and different writings by and about him.
20. Michael L. Lomax, “Countee Cullen: From the Darkish Tower” (Ph.D. diss., Emory Univ., 1984).  
21. .The biographical introduction to My Soul’s Excessive Music: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Gerald Early (1991). containing reprints of all Cullen’s revealed books besides Caroling Nightfall, The Misplaced Zoo, My Lives and How I Misplaced Them, and On These I Stand; in addition to some of Cullen’s uncollected poems, speeches, and essays.
22. Blanche E. Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance (1966)
23. Margaret Perry, A Bio-Bibliography of Countee P. Cullen, 1903-1946 (1971)
24. .Alan R. Shucard, Countee Cullen (1984)
25. Houston A. Baker, Jr., “A Many-Coloured Coat of Desires: The Poetry of Countee Cullen,” in his Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (1988), pp. 45-87  
26. Isaac William Brumfield, “Race Consciousness within the Poetry and Fiction of Countee Cullen” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 1977)  
27. Nicholas Canaday, Jr., “Main Themes within the Poetry of Countee Cullen,” in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps (1972), pp. 103-25  
28. .Eugenia W. Collier, “I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen,” in Fashionable Black Poets, ed. Donald B. Gibson (1973), pp. 69-83
29. .Arthur P. Davis, “The Alien-and-Exile Theme in Countee Cullen’s Racial Poems,” Phylon 14 (Fourth Quarter 1953): 390-400
30. Robert E. Fennell, “The Demise Determine in Countee Cullen’s Poetry” (M.A. thesis, Howard Univ.1970)
31. David Kirby, “Countee Cullen’s Heritage: A Black Waste
32. Land,” South Atlantic Bulletin 4 (1971): 14-20
33.  James Baldwin, “Rendezvous with Life: An Interview with Countee Cullen,” Magpie 26 (Winter 1942): 19-21
34.  David Levering, Baldwin (1994).
35. Obituaries and associated articles within the New York Herald Tribune, 10 Jan. 1946;  the New York Occasions, 10 and 12 Jan. 1946,  and the Negro Historical past Bulletin 14 (Feb. 1946): 98.

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Source by Arthur Smith