& # 8217 ; s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper
Gerald Early
Poet, anthologist, novelist, transcriber, kids & # 8217 ; s author, and
dramatist, Countee Cullen is something of a cryptic figure. He was born 30 March 1903,
but it has been hard for bookmans to put precisely where he was born, with whom he
spent the really earliest old ages of his childhood, and where he spent them. New York City and
Baltimore have been given as place of births. Cullen himself, on his college transcript at New
York University, lists Louisville, Kentucky, as his topographic point of birth. A few old ages subsequently,
when he had achieved considerable literary celebrity during the epoch known as the New Negro or
Harlem Renaissance, he was to asseverate that his place of birth was New York City, which he
continued to claim for the remainder of his life. Cullen & # 8217 ; s 2nd married woman, Ida, and some of
his closest friends, including Langston Hughes and Harold Jackman, said that Cullen was
born in Louisville. As James Weldon Johnson wrote of Cullen in The Book of American
Negro Poetry ( rpm. ed. , 1931 ) : “ There is non much to state about these earlier
old ages of Cullen & # 8211 ; unless he himself should state it. ” And Cullen & # 8211 ; uncovering a
disposition that was non precisely close but private, less a affair of modestness than a
inclination toward being encoded and tactful & # 8211 ; ne’er in his life said anything more
clarifying.
Sometime before 1918, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle
( Mitchell ) Cullen. It is impossible to province with certainty how old Cullen was when he was
adopted or how long he knew the Cullens before he was adopted. Apparently he went by the
name of Countee Porter until 1918. By 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen and finally merely
Countee Cullen. Harmonizing to Harold Jackman, Cullen & # 8217 ; s acceptance was ne’er
“ functionary. ” That is to state it was ne’er consummated through proper state-agency
channels. Indeed, it is hard to cognize if Cullen was of all time lawfully an orphan at any
phase in his childhood.
Frederick Cullen was a pioneer black militant curate. He established his Capital of oregon
Methodist Episcopal Church in a storefront mission upon his reaching in New York City in
1902, and in 1924 moved the Church to the site of a former white church in Harlem where he
could tout of a rank of more than 25 100. Countee Cullen himself
stated in Caroling Dusk ( 1927 ) that he was “ reared in the conservative
atmosphere of a Methodist vicarage, ” and it is clear that his Foster male parent was a
peculiarly strong influence. The two work forces were really close, frequently going abroad
together. But as Cullen evidences a distinct malaise in his poesy over his strong and
conservative Christian preparation and the attractive force of his heathen dispositions, his feelings
about his male parent may hold been slightly ambivalent. On the one manus, Frederick Cullen was
a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Cullen was ne’er remotely that in his life. On the
other manus, it has been suggested that Frederick Cullen was besides something of an
effeminate adult male. ( He was dressed in miss & # 8217 ; s vesture by his destitute female parent well
beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestitism. ) That Cullen was homosexual or of
a unquestionably equivocal sexual nature may besides be attributable to his Foster male parent & # 8217 ; s
contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent homophile.
Cullen was an outstanding pupil at DeWitt Clinton High School ( 1918-1921 ) . He edited
the school & # 8217 ; s newspaper, assisted in redacting the literary magazine, Magpie, and
began to compose poesy that achieved notice. While in high school Cullen won his first
competition, a citywide competition, with the verse form “ I Have a Rendezvous with Life, ”
a nonracial verse form inspired by Alan Seeger & # 8217 ; s “ I Have a Rendezvous with Death. ” At
New York University ( 1921-1925 ) , he wrote most of the verse form for his first three volumes: Color
( 1925 ) , Copper Sun ( 1927 ) , and The Ballad of the Brown Girl ( 1927 ) . If any
event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of this
instead diffident black male child who, more than any other black literary figure of his coevals, was
being touted and bred to go a major crossing over literary figure. Here was a black adult male
with considerable academic preparation who could, in consequence, compose “ white ”
verse-ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the similar & # 8211 ; much in the mode of Keats and the
British Romantics, ( albeit, on more than one juncture, tinged with racial concerns ) with
genuine accomplishment and obliging power. He was surely non the first Negro to try to
write such poetries but he was foremost to make so with such extended instruction and with such a
complete apprehension of himself as a poet. Merely two other black American poets before
Cullen could be taken so earnestly as self-consciously considered and adept poets:
Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. If the purpose of the Harlem Renaissance was, in
portion, the reinvention of the native-born Negro as a being who can be assimilated while
unquestionably retaining something called “ a racial uneasiness, ” so Cullen
suit the measure. If “ I Have a Rendezvous with Life ” was the gap salvo in the
devising of Culln & # 8217 ; s literary repute, so the 1924 publication of “ Shroud of
Color ” in H. L. Mencken & # 8217 ; s American Mercury confirmed the coming of the black
boy admiration as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene. After graduating Phi
Beta Kappa from NYU, Cullen earned a Masterss degree in English and Gallic from Harvard
( 1925-1927 ) . Between high school and his graduation from Harvard, Cullen was the most
popular black poet and virtually the most popular black literary figure in America. One of
Cullen & # 8217 ; s verse forms and his popular column in Opportunity inspired A & # 8217 ; Leila
Walker & # 8211 ; inheritress of Madame C. J. Walker & # 8217 ; s hair-care merchandises luck and proprietor of a salon
where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s & # 8211 ; to call her salon “ The
Dark Tower. ”
Cullen won more major literary awards than any other black author of the twentiess: foremost
award in the Witter Bynner Poetry competition in 1925, Poetry magazine & # 8217 ; s John Reed
Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, 2nd award in Opportunity
magazine & # 8217 ; s first poesy competition, and 2nd award in the poesy competition of Palms. In
add-on, he was the 2nd black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cullen was besides at the centre of one of the major societal events of the Harlem
Renascence: On 9 April 1928 he married Yolande Du Bois, merely kid of W E. B. Du Bois, in
one of the most munificent nuptialss in black New York history. This nuptials was to typify
the brotherhood of the expansive black rational patriarch and the new strain of younger Blacks
who were responsible for much of the exhilaration of the Renaissance. It was an disposed engagement
of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent
diehards. That the matrimony turned out so disastrously and ended so rapidly ( they
divorced in 1930 ) likely adversely affected Cullen, who remarried in 1940. In 1929,
Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems to less than his accustomed
glowing reappraisals. He was bitterly defeated that The Black Christ, his longest
and in many respects most complicated verse form, was considered by most critics and referees
to be his weakest and least distinguished.
From the 1930s until his decease, Cullen wrote a great trade less, partially hampered by his
occupation as a Gallic instructor at Frederick Douglass Junior High. ( His most celebrated pupil was
James Baldwin. ) But he wrote notable, even important work in a figure of genres. His
fresh One Way to Heaven, published in 1934, rates as one of the better black
sarcasms and is one of the three of import fictional retrospectives of the Harlem
Renaissance, the others being Wallace Thurman & # 8217 ; s Babies of the Spring and George S.
Schuyler & # 8217 ; s Black No More. Cullen & # 8217 ; s The Medea is the first major interlingual rendition
of a classical work by a twentieth-century black American author. Cullen & # 8217 ; s parts
to kids & # 8217 ; s literature, The Lost Zoo and *Christopher Cat, are among the
more clever and prosecuting books of kids & # 8217 ; s poetry, written at a clip when there was non
much published in this country by black authors. He besides completed possibly some of his best,
surely some of his more darkly composite, sonnets. He was besides working on a musical with
Arna Bontemps called St. Louis Woman ( based on Bontemps & # 8217 ; s fresh God Sends Sunday )
at the clip of his decease from high blood force per unit area and azotemic toxic condition on 9 January
1946.
For many old ages after his decease, Cullen & # 8217 ; s repute was eclipsed by that of other
Harlem Renaissance authors, peculiarly Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and his
work had gone out of print. In the last few old ages, nevertheless, there has been a revival of
involvement in Cullen & # 8217 ; s life and work and his Hagiographas are being reissued.
See: Blanche E. Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negor Renaissance, 1966.
Margaret Perry, A Bio-Bibliography of Countee P. Cullen, 1903-1946, 1966. Arna
Bontemps, ed. , The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, 1972. Arthur P. Davis, From
the Dark Tower: African-american Writers, 1900 to 1960, 1974. Alan R. Shucard, Countee
Cullen, 1984. Gerald Early, ed. , My Soul & # 8217 ; s High Song: The Collected Writings
of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, 1991.
From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright? 1997 by
Oxford University Press.
Clifton H. Johnson
Cullen, Countee ( 30 May 1903? -9 Jan. 1946 ) , poet and dramatist, was the boy of
Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. The name of his male parent is non known. The topographic point of his birth has
been diversely cited as Louisville, Kentucky, New York City, and Baltimore, Maryland.
Although in ulterior old ages Cullen claimed to hold been born in New York City, it likely was
Louisville, which he systematically named as his place of birth in his young person and which he wrote
on his enrollment signifier for New York University. His female parent died in Louisville in 1940.
In 1916 Cullen was enrolled in Public School Number 27 in the Bronx, New York, under
the name of Countee L. Porter, with no speech pattern on the first “ e. ” At that clip he
was populating with Amanda Porter, who by and large is assumed to hold been his grandma.
Shortly after she died in October 1917, Countee went to populate with the Reverend Frederick
Asbury Cullen, curate of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, and his married woman, the
former Carolyn Belle Mitchell. Countee was ne’er officially adopted by the Cullens, but he
subsequently claimed them as his natural parents and in 1918 assumed the name Count? vitamin E P.
( Porter ) Cullen. In 1925 he dropped the in-between initial.
Cullen was an outstanding pupil in every school he attended. He entered the
respected, about entirely white, Dewitt Clinton High School for male childs in Manhattan in
1918. He became a member of the Arista award society, and in his senior twelvemonth he received
the Magpie Cup in acknowledgment of his accomplishments. He served as frailty president of the
senior category and was associate editor of the 1921 Magpie, the school & # 8217 ; s literary
magazine, and editor of the Clinton News. He won an oratorical competition sponsored by
the movie histrion Douglas Fairbanks and served as financial officer of the Inter-High School Poetry
Society and as president of the Senior Publications Committee. His poesy appeared
on a regular basis in school publications and he received wider public acknowledgment in 1921 when his
verse form, “ I Have a Rendezvous with Life, ” won foremost prize in a citywide competition
sponsored by the Empire Federation of Women & # 8217 ; s Clubs. At New York University, which Cullen
& lt ;< p>attended on a New York State Regents scholarship, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his
junior twelvemonth and received a unmarried man & # 8217 ; s grade in 1925. His verse forms were published often
in the school magazine, The Arch, of which he finally became poetry editor. In
1926 he received a maestro & # 8217 ; s degree from Harvard University and won the Crisis
magazine award in poesy.
When Cullen & # 8217 ; s first aggregation of poesy, Color, was published in 1925 during
his senior twelvemonth at New York University, he had already achieved national celebrity. His verse form
had been published in Bookman, American Mercury, Harper & # 8217 ; s, Century,
State, Poetry, Crisis, the Messenger, Palms, and Opportunity.
He had won 2nd award in 1923 in the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Contest
sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. He placed 2nd in that competition once more in 1924
but won foremost prize in 1925, when he besides won the John Reed Memorial Prize awarded by Poetry
magazine.
Color received cosmopolitan critical acclamation. Alain Locke wrote in Opportunity
( Jan. 1926 ) : “ Ladies and Gentlemen! A mastermind! Posterity will express joy at us if we do non
proclaim him now. COLOR transcends all of the modification makings that might be
brought frontward if it were simply a work of endowment. ” The volume contains epitaphs,
merely two of which could be considered racial ; love verse forms ; and poems on other traditional
topics. But the important subject & # 8211 ; as the rubric implies & # 8211 ; was race, and it was the verse forms
covering with racial topics that captured the attending of the critics. Cullen was
praised for portraying the experience of African Americans in the vocabulary and poetic
signifiers of the classical tradition but with a personal familiarity. His 2nd volume of
poesy, Copper Sun, published in 1927 besides by Harper and Brothers ( the publishing house of
all his books ) , won first award in literature from the Harmon Foundation. There are fewer
racial verse form in this aggregation than in Color, nevertheless, they express an choler that
was non so pronounced in the earlier volume. The bulk of the verse forms in Copper Sun
trade with life and love and other traditional subjects of nineteenth-century poesy.
Cullen edited the October 1926 particular issue of Palms devoted to
Afro-american poets, and he collected and edited Caroling Dusk in 1927, an
anthology of poesy by African Americans. Cullen was by this clip by and large recognized by
critics and the populace as the taking literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Gerald
Early on in My Soul & # 8217 ; s High Song ( 1991 ) , Cullen & # 8217 ; s collected Hagiographas, said, “ He
was, so, a male child admiration, a immature fine-looking black Ariel rise, a boylike, brown-skinned
colossus who, in the early and twentiess, embodied many of the hopes, aspirations, and
maturating expressive possibilities of his people. ”
Cullen said that he wanted to be known as a poet, non a “ Negro poet. ” This
did non impact his popularity, although some Harlem Renaissance authors, including
Langston Hughes, interpreted this to intend that he wanted to deny his race, an
reading endorsed by some ulterior bookmans. A reading of his poesy reveals this position
to be baseless. In fact his major verse forms, and most of those still being printed in
anthologies, have racial subjects. Cullen expounded his position in the Brooklyn Eagle
( 10 Feb. 1924 ) :
If I am traveling to be a poet at all, I am traveling to be POET and non NEGRO POET. This is
what has hindered the development of creative persons among us. Their one note has been the concern
with their race. That is all really good, none of us can acquire off from it. I can non at
times. You will see it in my poetry. The consciousness of this is excessively affecting at times. I
can non get away it. But what I mean is this: I shall non compose of negro topics for the
intent of propaganda. That is non what a poet is concerned with. Of class, when the
emotion lifting out of the fact that I am a Black is strong, I express it. But that is
another affair.
From 1926 to 1928, Cullen was adjunct editor to Charles S. Johnson of Opportunity
( subtitled “ A Journal of Negro Life ” ) for which he besides wrote a characteristic column,
“ The Dark Tower. ” On the one manus, in his reappraisals and commentaries, he called
upon Afro-american authors to make a representative and respectable race literature,
and on the other insisted that the Afro-american creative person should non be bound by race or
restricted to racial subjects.
The twelvemonth 1928 was a watershed for Cullen. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to analyze
in Paris, the 3rd volume of his poesy, The Ballad of a Brown Girl, was
published, and, after a long wooing, he married Nina Yolande Du Bois. Her male parent,
W. E. B. Du Bois, the advocate of the “ Talented Tenth ” construct,
rejoiced at conveying the immature mastermind into his household. The nuptials, performed by Cullen & # 8217 ; s
Foster male parent, was the societal event of the decennary in Harlem. After a brief honeymoon in
Philadelphia, Cullen left for Paris and was shortly joined by his bride. The twosome
experient troubles from the beginning. Finally, after informing her male parent that
Cullen had confessed that he was sexually attracted to work forces, Nina Yolande sued for divorce,
which was obtained in Paris in 1930.
Cullen continued to compose and print after 1928, but his plants were no longer
universally acclaimed. The Black Christ and Other Poems, completed under the
Guggenheim Fellowship, was published in 1929 while he was abroad. His lone novel, One
Way to Heaven, was published in 1932, and The Medea and Some Poems in 1935. He
wrote two books for juveniles, The Lost Zoo ( 1940 ) and My Lives and How I Lost
Them ( 1942 ) . His phase version of One Way to Heaven was produced by several
amateur and professional theatre groups but remained one of his several unpublished dramas.
Critics gave these plants mixed reappraisals at best.
Cullen & # 8217 ; s repute as a author rests on his poesy. His novel is non an of import
work, and it received small attending from the critics. He rejected alleged wind and
free-style as inappropriate signifiers of poetic look. He was a romantic words poet and a
great supporter of John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay. While his arch traditionality and
deficiency of originality in manner had been seen in Color as minor defects, they came to be
viewed as major lacks in his later plants.
Cullen & # 8217 ; s autumn from grace with the critics had small consequence on his popularity. He
remained much in demand for talks and readings by both white and black groups. In 1931
entirely he read his poesy and lectured in assorted establishments in 17 provinces and
Canada. Some of his verse forms were set to music by Charles Marsh, Virgil Thomson, William
Schuman, William Lawrence, Margaret Bonds, Clarence Cameron White, Emerson Whithorne, and
Noel DaCosta. However, even though he continued to populate with his Foster male parent, royalties
and talk fees were deficient income for subsistence. He searched for academic
places and was offered chairs at Sam Huston College ( named for an Iowa husbandman,
non the Texas senator ) , Dillard University, Fisk University, Tougaloo College, and West
Virginia State College. There is no clear account of why he did non accept any of the
places. In 1932 he became a replacement instructor in New York public schools and became a
full-time instructor of English and French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in 1934,
a place he held until his decease ( caused by complications of high blood force per unit area ) in New
York City, and where he taught and inspired the future novelist and litterateur James
Baldwin.
Cullen married Ida Mae Roberson in 1940, and they seemingly enjoyed a happy married
life. Cullen & # 8217 ; s main originative involvement during the last twelvemonth of his life was in composing the
book for St. Louis Woman, a musical based on Arna Bontemps & # 8217 ; s fresh God Sends
Sunday. With music by Harold Arlen and wordss by Johnny Mercer, St. Louis Woman
opened on Broadway on 30 March 1946. Although the production was opposed by Walter White
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and some other civil
rights militants as an unfavourable representation of African Americans, it ran for four
months and was revived several times by amateurs and one professional group between 1959
and 1980.
On These I Stand, a aggregation of verse forms that Cullen had selected as his best,
was published posthumously in 1947. The hundred-and-thirty-fifth Street Branch of the New York Public Library
was named for Cullen in 1951, and a public school in New York City and one in Chicago besides
bear his name. For a few brief old ages Cullen was the most famed Afro-american
author in the state and by many histories is considered one of the major voices of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Bibliography
Count? vitamin E Cullen & # 8217 ; s personal documents ( 1921-1969, c. 4,400 manuscripts and exposure and
39 volumes ) are in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University ; microfilm
transcripts of that aggregation are in other depositories. The James Weldon Johnson Collection
in Beinecke Library at Yale University contains more than 900 letters written by and to
Cullen and other Hagiographas by and about him. One of the best lifes is Michael L.
Lomax, “ Countee Cullen: From the Dark Tower ” ( Ph.D. diss. , Emory Univ. , 1984 ) .
Besides valuable is the biographical debut to My Soul & # 8217 ; s High Song: The Collected
Hagiographas of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, erectile dysfunction. Gerald Early ( 1991 ) .
This volume contains reissues of all Cullen & # 8217 ; s published books except Caroling Dusk,
The Lost Zoo, My Lives and How I Lost Them, and On These I Stand ; it
besides contains some of Cullen & # 8217 ; s ungathered verse forms, addresss, and essays. See besides Blanche
E. Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance ( 1966 ) ; Margaret Perry, A
Bio-Bibliography of Count? vitamin E P. Cullen, 1903-1946 ( 1971 ) ; and Alan R. Shucard, Countee
Cullen ( 1984 ) , for biographical surveies. For critical surveies of Cullen & # 8217 ; s poesy, see
Houston A. Baker, Jr. , “ A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee
Cullen, ” in his African-american Poeticss: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic
( 1988 ) , pp. 45-87 ; Isaac William Brumfield, “ Race Consciousness in the Poetry and
Fiction of Countee Cullen ” ( Ph.D. diss. , Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana,
1977 ) ; Nicholas Canaday, Jr. , “ Major Subjects in the Poetry of Countee Cullen, ” in
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, erectile dysfunction. Arna Bontemps ( 1972 ) , pp. 103-25 ; Eugenia W.
Collier, “ I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen, ” in Modern Black Poets, erectile dysfunction.
Donald B. Gibson ( 1973 ) , pp. 69-83 ; Arthur P. Davis, “ The Alien-and-Exile Subject in
Countee Cullen & # 8217 ; s Racial Poems, ” Phylon 14 ( Fourth Quarter 1953 ) : 390-400 ;
Robert E. Fennell, “ The Death Figure in Countee Cullen & # 8217 ; s Poetry ” ( M.A. thesis,
Howard Univ. , 1970 ) ; and David Kirby, “ Countee Cullen & # 8217 ; s Heritage: A Black Waste
Land, ” South Atlantic Bulletin 4 ( 1971 ) : 14-20. Of value besides is James
Baldwin, “ Rendezvous with Life: An Interview with Countee Cullen, ” Magpie
26 ( Winter 1942 ) : 19-21. For an extended treatment of Cullen & # 8217 ; s impact on Baldwin, see
David Leeming, Baldwin ( 1994 ) . Obituaries and related articles are in the New
York Herald Tribune, 10 Jan. 1946 ; the New York Times, 10 and 12 Jan. 1946, and
the Negro History Bulletin 14 ( Feb. 1946 ) : 98.
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