COUNTEE CULLEN
The Harlem Renaissance and His Effect
For
a Lady I Know
She
even thinks that up in heaven
Her
class lies late and snores,
While
poor black cherubs rise at seven
To
do celestial chores.
Countee Cullen
Born Countee Porter May 30, 1903 in Lexington, Kentucky (?), Cullen was raised first by a
woman believed to be his paternal grandmother and then in a Methodist parsonage, the
adopted son of Reverend and Mrs. Frederick
In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du
Bois, and Opportunity. Soon after he was published in Harper’s, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He
won several awards-for his poem, Ballad of the
Brown Girl. Harper published his first volume of verse, Color (1925).
His second volume of poetry, CopperSun (1927)
met with controversy in the black community. Cullen
did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in Color.
Cullen had been raised and educated in a primarily white community, De Witt was one of the
finest public schools in New York and very few African-American students were enrolled
there. He differed from other poets of the
Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes, in that he lacked the background to comment from
personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his
writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was
resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists. Cullen's other verse collections
include Copper Sun (1927),
The Ballad of the Brown Girl
(1927) and The Black Christ (1929). He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1928
enabling him to study and write abroad, between the years 1928 and 1934 Cullen traveled
back and forth between France and United States.
From 1934 until his death, Cullen taught French, English, and creative writing at
Frederick Douglas Junior High School in New York. Cullen’s
later works included children’s stories such as THE LOST ZOO (1940) about the animals
Noah did not take on the ark and MY LIVES & AND HOW I LOST THEM, an autobiography of
his cat. Other publication’s include the
verse collections ON THESE I STAND (1947), novel ONE WAY TO HEAVEN (1932), a social comedy
of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City, THE MEDEA AND SOME POEMS
(1935), a collection of sonnets and short lyrics together with a translation of Euripide's
tragedy, and plays ST LOUIS WOMAN (1946, published 1971) & THE THIRD FOURTH OF JULY
(1946).
His friend and literary collaborator Arna Bontemps told that Cullen was very preoccupied
with the question of whether he would be remembered as a poet or as a "Negro
poet." Almost his only public comments
about the art in which he expressed himself were pleas for an evaluation of his work
strictly on its merits, without racial considerations. He was to learn, however, that this
was no easy matter. Cullen died on January 9,
1946.
The Harlem Renaissance
The 1920’s in New York City, Harlem, was a time exploding with African- American
artistry, political energy and racial pride. It
is often called the New Negro Movement-The Harlem Renaissance
was an awakening from
the
bleakness of slavery that had only
The Harlem Renaissance, a period of great achievement in African-American art, literature,
music and dance. Jazz and blues became the height of fashionable music and the
careers of such greats as jazz musician Duke Ellington and singer Bessie Smith
were founded. Literature was pushed to a new high with the 1925 publication of
Countee Cullen’s Color. His sensuous lyric
verse expressed themes in the life of his race and shed light on social reality. A fresh generation of writers emerged, although a
few were Harlem-born. Among the leading
In its segregated world of the early twentieth century, Harlem was a ghetto, but a
thriving ghetto, Blacks in Harlem were able to earn more than the average white family in
mant ares of the South. After World War I,
the US was economically booming and this benefited not only
We
shall not always plant while others reap
The
golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not
always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not
everlastingly while others sleep
Shall
we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not
always bend to somemore subtle brute;
We were not made to eternally weep.
The
night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White
stars is no less lovely being dark,
And
there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In
light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So
in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And
wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.
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