Books by Countee Cullen

Color (1925) / Copper Sun (1927) / Caroling Dusk (1927)  / The Black Christ (1929)  / My Soul's High Song (Anchor, 1990)

Houston Baker, Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen. Broadside Press, 1974

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Countee Cullen was born in New York city in 1903, the son of the Rev. R. A. Cullen, minister and founder of Salem M.E. Church. He was educated in New York public schools, being graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1922, and he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from New York University in June 1925 after being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. he entered Harvard University in the fall of 1925 and received his A.M. in English literature in 1926.

Cullen began to write when he was fourteen years old. a teacher in DeWitt Clinton High School gave an assignment to his class to write some verse and Cullen handed in "To A Swimmer" (the only free verse poem he has ever done). He thought no more of writing until a year later when he saw this poem published in The Modern School Magazine issue of May 1918. Cullen then became ambitious to write and his first verse appeared in The Crisis, official magazine of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]. While still in high school he was awarded first prize in a contest by the Federation of women's Clubs with his poem, "I Have a Rendezvous With Life."

When Cullen began to write, he was a great admirer of Tennyson. later he was influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Housman, Robinson, and, most of all, Keats. He is essentially an emotional and lyrical poet. His only present tendency towards free verse is limited to experimental attempts and he finds himself more and more inclined towards rigid forms. 

"Most things I write," he says, "I do for the sheer love of the music in them. A number of times I have said I wanted to be a poet and known as such and not as a Negro poet. Some how or other, however, I find my poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys and his sorrows--mostly of the latter--and of the heights and depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro."

Cullen has published: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), Caroling Dusk, a comprehensive anthology of Negro verse (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), and The Black Christ (1929).

Source: Dilly Tante, ed. Living Authors: a Book of Biographies. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1932

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Yet Do I Marvel

By Countee Cullen

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Excerpts from "Forward" of

Caroling Dusk

By Countee Cullen

The poet writes out of his experience, whether it be personal or vicarious, and as these experiences differ among other poets, so do they differ among Negro poets; for the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe. A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue. From the roots of varied experiences have flowered the dialect of Dunbar, the recent sermon poems of James Weldon Johnson, and some of Helene Johnson's more colloquial verses, which, differing essentially only in a few expressions peculiar to Negro slang, are worthy counterparts of verses done by John V. A. Weaver "in American." 

Attempt to hedge all these in with a name, and your imagination must deny the facts. Langston Hughes, poetizing the blues in his zeal to represent the Negro masses, and Sterling Brown, combining a similar interest in such poems as "Long Gone" and "The Odyssey of Big Boy" with a capacity for turning a neat sonnet according to the rules, represent differences as unique as those between Burns and Whitman. Jessie Fauset with Cornell University and training at the Sorbonne as her intellectual equipment surely justifies the very subjects and forms of her poems: "Touché," "La Vie C'est la Vie," "Noblesse Oblige," etc.; while Lewis Alexander, with no known degree from the University of Tokyo, is equally within the province of his creative prerogatives in composing Japanese hokkus and tankas. 

Although Anne Spencer lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and in her biographical note recognizes the Negro as the great American taboo, I have seen but two poems by her which are even remotely concerned with this subject; rather does she write with a cool precision that calls forth comparison with Amy Lowell and the influence of a rock-bound seacoast. And Lula Lowe Weeden, the youngest poet in the volume, living in the same Southern city, is too young to realize that she is colored in an environment calculated to impress her daily with the knowledge of this pigmentary anomaly.

There are lights and shades of difference even in their methods of decrying race injustices, where these peculiar experiences of Negro life cannot be overlooked. Claude McKay is most exercised, rebellious, and vituperative to a degree that clouds his lyricism in many instances, but silhouettes most forcibly his high dudgeon; while neither Arna Bontemps, at all times cool, calm, and intensely religious, nor Georgia Douglas Johnson, in many instances bearing up bravely under comparison with Sara Teasdale, takes advantage of the numerous opportunities offered them for rhymed polemics.

If dialect is missed in this collection, it is enough to state that the day of dialect as far as Negro poets are concerned is in the decline. Added to the fact that these poets are out of contact with this fast-dying medium, certain sociological considerations and the natural limitations of dialect for poetic expression militate against its use even as a tour de force. In a day when artificiality is so vigorously condemned, the Negro poet would be foolish indeed to turn to dialect. The majority of present-day poems in dialect are the efforts of white poets. . . .

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posted 9 November 2007