Countee Cullen Biography and List of Works

American poet, a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance (see more below). This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. However, Cullen considered poetry raceless, although his poem 'The Black Christ' took a racial theme, lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brains compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
('Yet Do I Marvel')

Countee Cullen was born in Louisville, Kentucy or Baltimore, Md., and reared by a woman who was probably his paternal grandmother. He was adopted unofficially at the age of 15 by the Reverend F.A. Cullen, minister of Salem M.E. Church, one of the largest congregations of Harlem. Later Reverend Cullen became the head of the Harlem chapter of NAACP. His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s.

As a schoolboy Cullen won a citywide poetry contest and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. At New York University his works attracted critical attention and his first collection of poems, COLOR (1925), was published before he finished college. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The book included 'Heritage,' probably his most famous poem. A brilliant student, Cullen was graduated from New York University Phi Beta Kappa. He attended Harvard and worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, 'The Dark Tower,' increased his literary reputation. Cullen's poetry collections THE BALLAD OF THE BROWN GIRL (1927) and COPPER SUN (1927) explored similar themes as Colour, but they were not so well received. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad and between the years 1928 and 1934 Cullen travelled back and forth between France and the United States.

By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. His marriage to Nina Yolande DuBois, daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, the leading black intellectual, did not succeed and they divorced in 1930. Extra load for the marriage was Cullen's and Harold Jackman's close friendship. Jackman was a teacher whom the writer Carl Van Vechten had used as model in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926). Cullen' second marriage was with Ida Mae Robertson.

As well as writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But in the late 1920s Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. In 1932 appeared his only novel, ONE WAY TO HEAVEN, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City. From 1934 until the end of his life he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in the New York City. During this period he also wrote two works for young readers: THE LOST ZOO (1940), poems about the animals Noah did not take on the ark, and MY LIVES AND HOW I LOST THEM, an autobiography of his cat. In the last years of his life Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre.

2. FOR JOHN KEATS, APOSTLE OF BEAUTY
Not writ in water nor in mist,
Sweet lyric throat, thy name.
Thy singing lips that cold death kissed
Have seared his own with flame.
(from 'Four Epitaphs')

As a poet Cullen was conservative: he did not ignore racial themes, but based his works on the models of 19th-century Romantic poets, especially Keats, and Poften used the traditional sonnet form. He urged Langston Hughes to avoid black jazz rhythms in his poetry and wrote: 'Yet do I marvel at this curious thing / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!' After the early 1930s Cullen avoided racial themes.

Cullen later publications include verse collections THE LOST ZOO (1940) and ON THESE I STAND (1947), THE MEDEA AND SOME POEMS (1935), a collection of sonnets and short lyrics together with a translation of Euripide's tragedy, MY LIVES AND HOW I LOST THEM (1942), and plays ST LOUIS WOMAN (1946, publ. 1971), which ran briefly on Broadway, and THE THIRD FOURTH OF JULY (publ. 1946). Cullen died on January 9, 1946.

Yet Do I Marvel (published in the collection Colour in 1925) - Reminiscent of the Romantic sonnets of William Wordsworth and William Blake. The poem is concerned with racial identity and injustice. The poet accepts that there is God, and 'God is good, well-meaning, kind', but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE: Period of outstanding literary creativity that took place in the United States during the 1920s. The movement was centred in the ghetto of Harlem, in New York City. Like other parts of New York, Harlem was a cosmopolitan community, where rural farm workers, black professionals, musicians, and hustlers, strolled along Seventh Avenue. A fresh generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Among the leading figures were Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, William Jourden Rapp, Arna Bontemps, and of course Countee Cullen, a leading voice of the period. - The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.

For further information: The New Negro by Alain Locke (1925); Cullen and the Negro Renaissance by B. Fergusson (1966); Native Sons by E. Margolies (1968); A Bio-Bibliography of Countee Porter Cullen 1903-1946 by M. Perry (1971); Black Poets of the United States by J. Wagner (1973); Many-Colored Coat of Dreams by H.A. Baker (1974); Black Poetry in America by B. Jackson and L. Rubin (1974); Harlem Renaissance by M. Perry (1982); Countee Cullen by A.R. Shucard (1984); Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr (1987); The Atlas of Literature, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (1996 - see chapter on Harlem Renaissance); The Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen by H.A. Baker, Jr. (1974); Countee Cullen by A. Shucard (1984); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996)

Works from other writers of Harlem Renaissance (not in any specific order):

COLOR, (1925)
James Weldon Johnson: Black Manhattan, (1930)