COUNTEE CULLEN
Poet, anthologist, novelist, and playwright, Countee Cullen, was born Countee LeRoy Porter on May 30th, 1903. Historians have had difficulty identifying his birthplace. Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and Louisville, Kentucky have been cited as possibilities. Although Cullen claimed to have been born in New York City, he also frequently referred to Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace on legal applications. He was abandoned by his parents at birth and raised by his grandmother, Mrs. Porter, until her death in 1918.
At this point he was informally adopted by the Reverend Frederick Ashbury Cullen and Carolyn Belle Cullen. Cullen was pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation. The Reverend was not only a minister but also a Black activist in Harlem. Reverend Cullen served as president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Countee LeRoy took Cullen as his surname was therefore raised a Methodist. Cullen himself absorbed the activism but realized his literary inclination.
From 1918-1921, Cullen attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he edited the school newspaper and literary magazine. As a schoolboy, Cullen won a citywide competition for his poem "I Have a Rendezvous with Life", and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. At DeWitt Clinton High School his classmates mainly consisted of White, male students but he still became Vice President of his class during his senior year. After graduating, he entered New York University in 1922, where his works attracted critical attention.
His poems were published in "The Crisis - official publication of the NAACP", under the leadership of W.E.B Du Bois, and "Opportunity", a magazine of the National Urban League. He was soon published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. At New York University he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and while in his sophomore year there he took second place in the Witter Bynner intercollegiate poetry contest, for his poem "Ballad of the Brown Girl". The ensuing year, he again placed second in the contest, finally winning first prize in 1925.
That same year, Cullen released his lauded debut volume of poetry, "Color" his first collection of poems that later became a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance. The volume included "Heritage" and "Incident", probably his most famous poems. Later that year, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from NYU, Cullen attended Harvard University. He graduated with a master's in English from Harvard University in 1926. Subsequently he joined the editorial staff of Opportunity magazine, penning the column "From the Dark Tower," which was a review of works from the African American literati.
Cullen’s conventional approach to poetry, both in form and subject matter, put him at odds with several of the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the poets, including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, all deeply respected one another. Cullen frowned upon Hughes’s experimentation with poetic form within a jazz idiom or how the blues might be adapted by Black poets. Unlike fellow poet, Sterling Brown, dialect was not to be the ground of his achievement. The more conservative writers such as Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, advocated for literature to represent the more respectable aspects of the Black American life.
His second volume of poetry, "Copper Sun" (1927), met with controversy in the Black community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in Color. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad. In 1929, Cullen published "The Black Christ and Other Poems" to less than his accustomed glowing reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that "The Black Christ", his longest and in many respects most complicated collection of poems, was considered by most critics and reviewers to be his weakest and least distinguished. In the poem, Cullen compared the lynching of a Black man to Christ's crucifixion.
Cullen went on to publish several collections of poems, an anthology of African American verse, a novel. He wrote two children’s books: "The Lost Zoo", poems about the animals who perished in the Flood. His second book "My Lives and How I Lost Them", was an autobiography of his cat. The Harlem Renaissance was influenced by a movement called Négritude, which represents "the discovery of black values and the Negro’s awareness of his situation". Cullen's poetry "Heritage" and "Dark Tower" reflect ideas of the Negritude movement. These poems examine African roots and intertwine them with a fresh aspect of African-American life.
Cullen was at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance. On April 9, 1928 Countee Cullen married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W.E.B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in Black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand Black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger Negroes who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. The marriage ended quickly with a divorce in 1930. From 1934 until the end of his life Countee Cullen taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in the New York City.
In the last years of his life Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. With Arna Bontemps he adapted her novel, "God Sends Sunday" (1931), as "St. Louis Woman" for the musical stage. The Broadway musical, set in poor black neighborhood in St. Louis, was criticized by Black intellectuals for creating a negative image of Black Americans. In 1940 Cullen once again married, this time to Ida Mae Robertson. The couple had been close for about ten years before the marriage. They remained happily married until his death.
As a poet Cullen was conservative: he did not ignore racial themes, but based his works on the Romantic poets, especially John Keats, and often used the traditional sonnet form. Not wanting to be considered a "Negro" poet, but rather a poet, Cullen ran into an age-old problem that African-American artists encounter. He did not wish to be categorized, but rather appreciated as an artist who happened to be of African descent, who wrote beautiful verses with racial themes.