(His third book of poetry. This book met with controversy ...)
His third book of poetry. This book met with controversy in the black community because he did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in "Color".
(This selection from the work of thirty-eight poets was ma...)
This selection from the work of thirty-eight poets was made by Countee Cullen in 1927. His stated purpose at the time was to bring together a miscellany of deeply appreciated but scattered verse.
Beginning with the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who, though there were black poets before him, is generally credited as the first black poet to make a deep impression on the literary world, the book includes the writings of James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Faucet, Sterling A. Brown, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen himself, to name only a few.
Each poem includes poignant biographical notes written by the poets themselves, with the exception of the notes on Dunbar (written by his wife), Joseph S. Cotter, Jr. (written by his father), and Lula Weeden (written by her mother).
Most of the poets became well known and widely published in the years that followed. These poems remain powerful statements of what it means to be human, whatever the race.
Long out of print, "Caroling Dusk" is a valuable addition to the body of black literature. This is the first time the anthology has appeared in a paperback edition.
(A major and sometimes controversial figure of the Harlem ...)
A major and sometimes controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen fused a mastery of the formal lyric with a passionate engagement with themes social, religious, racial, and personal in such books as Color, Copper Sun, and The Black Christ. Certain of his poemsHeritage, Yet Do I Marvelare widely celebrated, but much of Cullens work remains to be discovered. This volume restores to print a body of work of singular intensity and beauty.
This is volume #32 in The Library of Americas American Poets Project series.
Countee Cullen was an American writer, editor, and educator. A prodigal poet of articulate manner and exceptional academic ability, Countee Cullen emerged in the 1920s as the most famous black writer in America. Cullen’s “Song of the Poets,” published in Magpie in 1918, emerged as a tribute to the great American and English poets.
Background
Countee Cullen was born on May 30, 1903, probably in New York City, New York, United States. Raised by Mrs. Porter, a woman thought to be his grandmother, Countee moved to New York City around the age of nine, taking up residence in a Harlem apartment not far from the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. Impressed by the precocious and well-mannered child, the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick Cullen adopted Countee and gave him a room in Salem’s quiet 14-room parsonage. Although the adoption was never legalized, Cullen became deeply devoted to his new parents. In his adoptive father’s library, Cullen began to explore the world of books and literature.
Education
Though his early years were spent in rigorous study, Cullen enjoyed the family’s summer trips to Maryland and New Jersey. On February 4, 1918, Cullen enrolled in Dewitt Clinton High School, a highly regarded, predominately white, boy’s school. An excellent student—he was elected to the school’s honor society, Arista—Cullen worked on the school’s literary magazine, Magpie, eventually becoming the associate editor.
He studied Latin and read the works of nineteenth-century English poets Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, and African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Another high school. Education: New York University, B. A., 1925; Harvard University, M. A., 1926. In 1922 Cullen graduated from Dewitt Clinton and entered New York University on a State Regents Scholarship.
Career
At New York University, Cullen began his distinguished career as a poet. At this time, Cullen’s poems began to appear in the pages of leading American periodicals, including Opportunity, Crisis, the Bookman, Poetry, Harper’s, Nation, and American Mercury.
In 1925 graduated Phi Beta Kappa from NYU. Critically acclaimed in white and black literary circles, Color made Cullen the most nationally celebrated African-American poet since Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Divided into three sections, Color contains 74 poems, one-third of which deal with racial themes.
Rooted in traditional sonnet form, the book’s poems reveal what S. P. Fullinwinder described in The Mind and Mood of Black America, as a struggle between “myth and modernity”—an inner struggle between the fundamentalist faith of his adoptive father and the pagan impulse of his poetic vision.
One of the finest and most famous poems of the volume, “Heritage, ” represents this struggle between faith and racial identity. As Gerald Early pointed out in My Soul’s High Song, Cullen’s criticism of jazz poetry stemmed from the fact that he “believed jazz to be an insufficiently developed, insufficiently permanent art form to use as an aesthetic for poetry. ”
Harlem’s Poet Scholar. Determined to become a poet of high literary tradition, Cullen entered Harvard University in 1925, to study the literature. The year 1927 also saw the publication of Cullen’s Copper Sun and Ballad of a Brown Girl. Although Copper Sun won the general approval of critics, many agreed that it lacked the intensity of Color. Cullen dedicated Copper Sun to Yolande Du Bois, daughter of famous National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founder and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. Introduced to Yolande in the summer of 1923, Cullen’s courtship greatly pleased her father.
But despite her prestigious social position, Yolande was, according to historian David Levering Lewis, “a kind” yet “plain women of the modest intellectual endowment, ” who, as it was well known among Harlem circles, was infatuated with jazz band leader Jimmie Lunceford. Nevertheless, Yolande and Cullen were married by Reverend Cullen on April 9, 1928, in the Salem Methodist Church. Among the ushers were the famous black poets Ama Bontemps and Langston Hughes. Not long after the wedding, Cullen traveled to France on a Guggenheim fellowship.
Leaving his wife, who was to join him later in Paris, Cullen departed for Europe on June 30 with his father and close friend Harold Jackman. When Yolande joined Cullen in July of 1928, the couple decided to end their relationship. After Yolande returned to America, Cullen stayed in Paris and completed The Black Christ and Other Poems. One of the many poems dedicated to the painful break-up with his wife, “Foolish Heart” was a poignant example of Cullen’s painful reflection: “Be still, heart, cease those measured strokes; /Lie quiet in your hollow bed; /This moving frame is but a hoax; /To make you think you are not dead. ” Published in 1930, The Black Christ, “hopefully dedicated to white America, ” failed to win the favor of critics.
Many complained that the book’s 47 poems lacked intensity and the proud defiant mood of his earlier work. The title poem deals with two brothers in the South, who are told by their mother to keep their faith in God. After the rebellious brother Jim kills a man, he is murdered by a lynch mob, symbolizing the crucifixion of Christ and the tragic death of spring. The unsuccessful attempt to fuse these two themes, however, led critics to dismiss the poem as inappropriate, confused, and unrealistic. Confronted by this harsh criticism of his work, Cullen returned to the United States in 1930.
Divorced from his wife in the same year, he soon set out to write the novel One Way to Heaven. As Gerald Early explained in My Soul’s High Song, the book reveals Cullen’s strong sense of individuality by condemning “orthodoxy and mindless uniformity as the worst sort of deception. ” Although he was offered a position at Dillard University in New Orleans, Cullen took a job as the French teacher at Frederick Douglas Junior High School in 1934.
Cullen’s The Medea, and Some Poems, published in 1935, contained his translation of Euripides’s classical Greek play Medea as well as 18 verses. Included was the protest poem “Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song, ” dedicated to nine black youths wrongly accused of the rape of two white women in Alabama.
Though Cullen’s career as a poet had long since faded by the mid-1940s, he left behind a lifetime of works that, as Gerald Early wrote in My Soul’s High Song, contributed to “the entire concept of the Harlem Renaissance and the formation of a national black culture. ” Given the enduring impact of Cullen’s work, he remains a true voice of his time and an American poetic genius. In 1940 he published a collection of children’s poems entitled The Lost Zoo.
Quotations:
Cullen wrote in Opportunity that “I wonder if jazz poems really belong to that dignified company, that select and austere circle of high literary expression we call poetry. ”
In committing himself to the elevation of African-American art, Cullen stated in the book’s introduction that, “I have called this collection an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than an anthology of Negro verse. ” During 1942 Cullen was interviewed in his former alma mater’s publication, Magpie, by young Dewitt Clinton high school student James Baldwin, who would himself become a brilliant writer. In his summation of the condition of the black artist in America, Cullen told Baldwin that “in this field one gets pretty much what he deserves…. If you’re really something, nothing can hold you back. In the artistic field, society recognizes the Negro as an equal and, in some cases, as a superior member. ”
Connections
Yolande and Cullen were married by Reverend Cullen on April 9, 1928, in the Salem Methodist Church. When Yolande joined Cullen in July of 1928, the couple decided to end their relationship. In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Roberson and moved into a comfortable suburban home in Tuckahoe, New York.
