History
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen was a prominent African American poet during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. His work often explored themes of race, identity, and the African American experience, and he was known for his use of traditional poetic forms and lyrical language. Cullen's poetry contributed to the cultural and literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance, which celebrated African American art and culture.
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eBook - ePubThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Fourth Edition
- Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
In the early years of the so-called *Harlem Renaissance, which spanned most of the 1920s and early 1930s, poetry played a decisive role. Replacing the tension between standard Eng. and dialect verse was a not entirely unrelated clash between a devotion to traditional notions concerning poetry and a contrary passion for contemp. black mass culture. This clash played itself out most dramatically in the contrast between the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Extravagantly admiring the Eng. poets John Keats (as in “To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time”) and A. E. Housman, Cullen saw the lang. of lower-class urban black culture as inimical to true poetry. He also nursed a mournful sense of his identity as a black poet, as his title “The Shroud of Color” suggests. His sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel” ends with the speaker amazed that an inscrutable God should have done “this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” The sense of a self-destructive conflict between being black and Am. haunts his major poem, “Heritage” (“What is Africa to me? / Copper sun and scarlet sea . . .”). This poem also hints at its persona’s possibly conflicted sexuality; but the themes of gayness, lesbianism, and bisexuality were topics that few white and virtually no black poets dared to treat at that time. Nevertheless, with his first volume, Color (1925), Cullen established his reputation as a harbinger of a new day in black poetry, one rooted in youth and modernity. Hughes saw poetry differently. He built his early reputation on a succession of poems, such as his signature “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” that calmly asserted the beauty, integrity, and history of the Af. Am. people. Such work dominated his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), but his second, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), broke new ground with its privileging of the *blues as its major influence
eBook - ePub- Gail McDonald, David E. Chinitz(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Negro Poetry and Drama, and The Negro in American Fiction. 1937. New York: Atheneum, 1969.Cullen, Countee, ed. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets. 1927. New York: Citadel, 1993.Cullen, Countee. My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen. Ed. Gerald Early. New York: Anchor, 1991.De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, 1996.Dunn, Allen, and George Hutchinson, eds. The Future of the Harlem Renaissance. Spec. issue of Soundings 80.4 (1997).FIRE!!: A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Ed. Wallace Thurman. 1926. Facsim. ed. Metuchen, NJ: Fire!!, 1982.Ford, Karen Jackson. “The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 369–404.Honey, Maureen, ed. Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996.Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. London: Oxford UP, 1971.Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Knopf, 1994.Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Nation 23 June 1926: 692–94.Rpt. in Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. Ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. 31–36.Hull, Gloria. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.Johnson, Helene. “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem.” Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets. Ed. Countee Cullen. 1927. New York: Citadel, 1993. 217.Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. 1922. Rev. ed. 1931. New York: Harcourt, 1959.Kerlin, Robert T. Negro Poets and Their Poems
eBook - ePubBrown Beauty
Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II
- Laila Haidarali(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- NYU Press(Publisher)
Saturday Evening Quill. Together, women’s poetry presents a textured compendium of the frustrations, expectations, and desires of middle-class New Negro women. Neither a collective movement nor an explicitly designed set of political expressions, this range of women’s verse showcases the use of color as a poetic device and as a descriptor of African American complexions. More acutely, the employment of color in women’s verse exposes some of the era’s contested gender politics, while emphasizing the role of complexion in general, and brownness in particular, in determinations of women’s beauty, social worth, and sexual respectability. This chapter is organized into two parts: first, it considers the women behind the words to offer biographies of these poets; second, it analyzes the poetry associated with middle-class notions of New Negro women with attention to the metaphoric use of brown. This popular mode illuminates the divide between women’s public physical personas and their creative attempts to reconcile subjective views of self from some of the aging prescriptions of New Negro womanhood. To put these two strands into fuller context, it is helpful to consider the unique importance of poetry in women’s cultural production of brownness within the larger context of Harlem’s literary and arts movement.“The Voice of My Own Experience”
Writing in 1972, Arna Bontemps, an African American male writer, reflected on the Harlem Renaissance and his role within the vibrant cultural movement. As he signaled certain key moments as marking its dawning and his “awakening,” Bontemps underlined the poem “Brown Boy to a Brown Girl” as one that “sounded like the voice of my own experience.” Reflecting on the poem written by Countee Cullen and published in Opportunity magazine in 1925, Bontemps explains, “I was enchanted.”3 Clearly, men also wrote and were moved by poetry and the use of brownness in poetry of the period; Bontemps’s reflection underlines its accessibility to readers across gender lines. This chapter focuses on women’s use of color descriptors, most notably brown and brown skin, to excise some of its unique meanings for and about New Negro womanhood.Poetry played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance’s commitment to representing the New Negro. Regularly featured in the major journals of the arts-based New Negro Renaissance, poetry was also showcased in the movement’s influential anthologies. Not surprisingly, these collections were assembled by African American men. Predating Locke’s New Negro, The Book of American Negro Poetry was compiled in 1922 by James Weldon Johnson, an older, well-established author. At the height of the Renaissance, the titles of anthologies engaged more metaphoric language, signaling the growing use of color to signify racialized identities. For example, in 1927 Countee Cullen, by then a renowned Harlem poet, edited the collection Caroling Dusk; its title evokes both light and darkness, suggesting the time and tone of the New Negro’s relation to racial oppression. That same year, the well-connected and influential editor of Opportunity, Charles S. Johnson, produced another vital anthology, Ebony and Topaz
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