About Countee Cullen

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

Gerald Early

Poet, anthologist, novelist, translator, children’s writer, and

playwright, Countee Cullen is something of a mysterious figure. He was born 30 March 1903,

but it has been difficult for scholars to place exactly where he was born, with whom he

spent the very earliest years of his childhood, and where he spent them. New York City and

Baltimore have been given as birthplaces. Cullen himself, on his college transcript at New

York University, lists Louisville, Kentucky, as his place of birth. A few years later,

when he had achieved considerable literary fame during the era known as the New Negro or

Harlem Renaissance, he was to assert that his birthplace was New York City, which he

continued to claim for the rest of his life. Cullen’s second wife, 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 (rev. ed., 1931): "There is not much to say about these earlier

years of Cullen–unless he himself should say it." And Cullen–revealing a

temperament that was not exactly secretive but private, less a matter of modesty than a

tendency toward being encoded and tactful–never 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 state 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 eventually just

Countee Cullen. According to Harold Jackman, Cullen’s adoption was never

"official." That is to say it was never consummated through proper state-agency

channels. Indeed, it is difficult to know if Cullen was ever legally an orphan at any

stage in his childhood.

Frederick Cullen was a pioneer black activist minister. He established his Salem

Methodist Episcopal Church in a storefront mission upon his arrival 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 boast of a membership of more than twenty-five hundred. Countee Cullen himself

stated in Caroling Dusk (1927) that he was "reared in the conservative

atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage," and it is clear that his foster father was a

particularly strong influence. The two men were very close, often traveling abroad

together. But as Cullen evidences a decided unease in his poetry over his strong and

conservative Christian training and the attraction of his pagan inclinations, his feelings

about his father may have been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, Frederick Cullen was

a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Cullen was never remotely that in his life. On the

other hand, it has been suggested that Frederick Cullen was also something of an

effeminate man. (He was dressed in girl’s clothing by his poverty-stricken mother well

beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism.) That Cullen was homosexual or of

a decidedly ambiguous sexual nature may also be attributable to his foster father’s

contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent homosexual.

Cullen was an outstanding student at DeWitt Clinton High School (1918-1921). He edited

the school’s newspaper, assisted in editing the literary magazine, Magpie, and

began to write poetry that achieved notice. While in high school Cullen won his first

contest, a citywide competition, with the poem "I Have a Rendezvous with Life,"

a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger’s "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." At

New York University (1921-1925), he wrote most of the poems 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

rather shy black boy who, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was

being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure. Here was a black man

with considerable academic training who could, in effect, write "white"

verse-ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like–much in the manner of Keats and the

British Romantics, (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns) with

genuine skill and compelling power. He was certainly not the first Negro to attempt to

write such verse but he was first to do so with such extensive education and with such a

complete understanding of himself as a poet. Only two other black American poets before

Cullen could be taken so seriously as self-consciously considered and proficient poets:

Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. If the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was, in

part, the reinvention of the native-born Negro as a being who can be assimilated while

decidedly retaining something called "a racial self-consciousness," then Cullen

fit the bill. If "I Have a Rendezvous with Life" was the opening salvo in the

making of Culln’s literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of "Shroud of

Color" in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury confirmed the advent of the black

boy wonder as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene. After graduating Phi

Beta Kappa from NYU, Cullen earned a masters degree in English and French 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’s poems and his popular column in Opportunity inspired A’Leila

Walker–heiress of Madame C. J. Walker’s hair-care products fortune and owner of a salon

where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s–to name her salon "The

Dark Tower."

Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first

prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine’s John Reed

Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity

magazine’s first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. In

addition, he was the second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Cullen was also at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem

Renaissance: On 9 April 1928 he married Yolande Du Bois, 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. It was an apt meshing

of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent

traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly (they

divorced in 1930) probably adversely affected Cullen, who remarried in 1940. 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 poem, was considered by most critics and reviewers

to be his weakest and least distinguished.

From the 1930s until his death, Cullen wrote a great deal less, partly hampered by his

job as a French teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High. (His most famous student was

James Baldwin.) But he wrote noteworthy, even significant work in a number of genres. His

novel One Way to Heaven, published in 1934, rates as one of the better black

satires and is one of the three important fictional retrospectives of the Harlem

Renaissance, the others being Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring and George S.

Schuyler’s Black No More. Cullen’s The Medea is the first major translation

of a classical work by a twentieth-century black American writer. Cullen’s contributions

to children’s literature, The Lost Zoo and *Christopher Cat, are among the

more clever and engaging books of children’s verse, written at a time when there was not

much published in this area by black writers. He also completed perhaps some of his best,

certainly some of his more darkly complex, sonnets. He was also working on a musical with

Arna Bontemps called St. Louis Woman (based on Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday)

at the time of his death from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on 9 January

1946.

For many years after his death, Cullen’s reputation was eclipsed by that of other

Harlem Renaissance writers, particularly Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and his

work had gone out of print. In the last few years, however, there has been a resurgence of

interest in Cullen’s life and work and his writings 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: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960, 1974. Alan R. Shucard, Countee

Cullen, 1984. Gerald Early, ed., My Soul’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 playwright, was the son of

Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. The name of his father is not known. The place of his birth has

been variously cited as Louisville, Kentucky, New York City, and Baltimore, Maryland.

Although in later years Cullen claimed to have been born in New York City, it probably was

Louisville, which he consistently named as his birthplace in his youth and which he wrote

on his registration form for New York University. His mother 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 accent on the first "e." At that time he

was living with Amanda Porter, who generally is assumed to have been his grandmother.

Shortly after she died in October 1917, Countee went to live with the Reverend Frederick

Asbury Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, and his wife, the

former Carolyn Belle Mitchell. Countee was never formally adopted by the Cullens, but he

later claimed them as his natural parents and in 1918 assumed the name Count?e P.

(Porter) Cullen. In 1925 he dropped the middle initial.

Cullen was an outstanding student in every school he attended. He entered the

respected, almost exclusively white, Dewitt Clinton High School for boys in Manhattan in

1918. He became a member of the Arista honor society, and in his senior year he received

the Magpie Cup in recognition of his achievements. He served as vice president of the

senior class and was associate editor of the 1921 Magpie, the school’s literary

magazine, and editor of the Clinton News. He won an oratorical contest sponsored by

the film actor Douglas Fairbanks and served as treasurer of the Inter-High School Poetry

Society and as chairperson of the Senior Publications Committee. His poetry appeared

regularly in school publications and he received wider public recognition in 1921 when his

poem, "I Have a Rendezvous with Life," won first prize in a citywide contest

sponsored by the Empire Federation of Women’s Clubs. At New York University, which Cullen

attended on a New York State Regents scholarship, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his

junior year and received a bachelor’s degree in 1925. His poems were published frequently

in the school magazine, The Arch, of which he eventually became poetry editor. In

1926 he received a master’s degree from Harvard University and won the Crisis

magazine award in poetry.

When Cullen’s first collection of poetry, Color, was published in 1925 during

his senior year at New York University, he had already achieved national fame. His poems

had been published in Bookman, American Mercury, Harper’s, Century,

Nation, Poetry, Crisis, the Messenger, Palms, and Opportunity.

He had won second prize in 1923 in the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Contest

sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. He placed second in that contest again in 1924

but won first prize in 1925, when he also won the John Reed Memorial Prize awarded by Poetry

magazine.

Color received universal critical acclaim. Alain Locke wrote in Opportunity

(Jan. 1926): "Ladies and Gentlemen! A genius! Posterity will laugh at us if we do not

proclaim him now. COLOR transcends all of the limiting qualifications that might be

brought forward if it were merely a work of talent." The volume contains epitaphs,

only two of which could be considered racial; love poems; and poems on other traditional

subjects. But the significant theme–as the title implies–was race, and it was the poems

dealing with racial subjects that captured the attention of the critics. Cullen was

praised for portraying the experience of African Americans in the vocabulary and poetic

forms of the classical tradition but with a personal intimacy. His second volume of

poetry, Copper Sun, published in 1927 also by Harper and Brothers (the publisher of

all his books), won first prize in literature from the Harmon Foundation. There are fewer

racial poems in this collection than in Color, however, they express an anger that

was not so pronounced in the earlier volume. The majority of the poems in Copper Sun

deal with life and love and other traditional themes of nineteenth-century poetry.

Cullen edited the October 1926 special issue of Palms devoted to

African-American poets, and he collected and edited Caroling Dusk in 1927, an

anthology of poetry by African Americans. Cullen was by this time generally recognized by

critics and the public as the leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Gerald

Early in My Soul’s High Song (1991), Cullen’s collected writings, said, "He

was, indeed, a boy wonder, a young handsome black Ariel ascending, a boyish, brown-skinned

titan who, in the early and mid-twenties, embodied many of the hopes, aspirations, and

maturing expressive possibilities of his people."

Cullen said that he wanted to be known as a poet, not a "Negro poet." This

did not affect his popularity, although some Harlem Renaissance writers, including

Langston Hughes, interpreted this to mean that he wanted to deny his race, an

interpretation endorsed by some later scholars. A reading of his poetry reveals this view

to be unfounded. In fact his major poems, and most of those still being printed in

anthologies, have racial themes. Cullen expounded his view in the Brooklyn Eagle

(10 Feb. 1924):

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET. This is

what has hindered the development of artists among us. Their one note has been the concern

with their race. That is all very well, none of us can get away from it. I cannot at

times. You will see it in my verse. The consciousness of this is too poignant at times. I

cannot escape it. But what I mean is this: I shall not write of negro subjects for the

purpose of propaganda. That is not what a poet is concerned with. Of course, when the

emotion rising out of the fact that I am a negro is strong, I express it. But that is

another matter.

From 1926 to 1928, Cullen was assistant editor to Charles S. Johnson of Opportunity

(subtitled "A Journal of Negro Life") for which he also wrote a feature column,

"The Dark Tower." On the one hand, in his reviews and commentaries, he called

upon African-American writers to create a representative and respectable race literature,

and on the other insisted that the African-American artist should not be bound by race or

restricted to racial themes.

The year 1928 was a watershed for Cullen. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study

in Paris, the third volume of his poetry, The Ballad of a Brown Girl, was

published, and, after a long courtship, he married Nina Yolande Du Bois. Her father,

W. E. B. Du Bois, the exponent of the "Talented Tenth" concept,

rejoiced at bringing the young genius into his family. The wedding, performed by Cullen’s

foster father, was the social event of the decade in Harlem. After a brief honeymoon in

Philadelphia, Cullen left for Paris and was soon joined by his bride. The couple

experienced difficulties from the beginning. Finally, after informing her father that

Cullen had confessed that he was sexually attracted to men, Nina Yolande sued for divorce,

which was obtained in Paris in 1930.

Cullen continued to write and publish after 1928, but his works 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 only 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 stage adaptation of One Way to Heaven was produced by several

amateur and professional theater groups but remained one of his several unpublished plays.

Critics gave these works mixed reviews at best.

Cullen’s reputation as a writer rests on his poetry. His novel is not an important

work, and it received little attention from the critics. He rejected so-called jazz and

free-style as inappropriate forms of poetic expression. He was a romantic lyric poet and a

great admirer of John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay. While his arch traditionalism and

lack of originality in style had been seen in Color as minor flaws, they came to be

viewed as major deficiencies in his later works.

Cullen’s fall from grace with the critics had little effect on his popularity. He

remained much in demand for lectures and readings by both white and black groups. In 1931

alone he read his poetry and lectured in various institutions in seventeen states and

Canada. Some of his poems 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 live with his foster father, royalties

and lecture fees were insufficient income for subsistence. He searched for academic

positions and was offered professorships at Sam Huston College (named for an Iowa farmer,

not the Texas senator), Dillard University, Fisk University, Tougaloo College, and West

Virginia State College. There is no clear explanation of why he did not accept any of the

positions. In 1932 he became a substitute teacher in New York public schools and became a

full-time teacher of English and French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in 1934,

a position he held until his death (caused by complications of high blood pressure) in New

York City, and where he taught and inspired the future novelist and essayist James

Baldwin.

Cullen married Ida Mae Roberson in 1940, and they apparently enjoyed a happy married

life. Cullen’s chief creative interest during the last year of his life was in writing the

script for St. Louis Woman, a musical based on Arna Bontemps’s novel God Sends

Sunday. With music by Harold Arlen and lyrics 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 activists as an unfavorable 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 collection of poems that Cullen had selected as his best,

was published posthumously in 1947. The 135th 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 also

bear his name. For a few brief years Cullen was the most celebrated African-American

writer in the nation and by many accounts is considered one of the major voices of the

Harlem Renaissance.

Bibliography

Count?e Cullen’s personal papers (1921-1969, c. 4,400 manuscripts and photographs and

thirty-nine volumes) are in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University; microfilm

copies of that collection are in other repositories. The James Weldon Johnson Collection

in Beinecke Library at Yale University contains more than 900 letters written by and to

Cullen and other writings by and about him. One of the best biographies is Michael L.

Lomax, "Countee Cullen: From the Dark Tower" (Ph.D. diss., Emory Univ., 1984).

Also valuable is the biographical introduction to My Soul’s High Song: The Collected

Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Gerald Early (1991).

This volume contains reprints of all Cullen’s published books except Caroling Dusk,

The Lost Zoo, My Lives and How I Lost Them, and On These I Stand; it

also contains some of Cullen’s uncollected poems, speeches, and essays. See also Blanche

E. Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance (1966); Margaret Perry, A

Bio-Bibliography of Count?e P. Cullen, 1903-1946 (1971); and Alan R. Shucard, Countee

Cullen (1984), for biographical studies. For critical studies of Cullen’s poetry, see

Houston A. Baker, Jr., "A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee

Cullen," in his Afro-American Poetics: 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 Themes in the Poetry of Countee Cullen," in

The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps (1972), pp. 103-25; Eugenia W.

Collier, "I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen," in Modern Black Poets, ed.

Donald B. Gibson (1973), pp. 69-83; Arthur P. Davis, "The Alien-and-Exile Theme in

Countee Cullen’s Racial Poems," Phylon 14 (Fourth Quarter 1953): 390-400;

Robert E. Fennell, "The Death Figure in Countee Cullen’s Poetry" (M.A. thesis,

Howard Univ., 1970); and David Kirby, "Countee Cullen’s Heritage: A Black Waste

Land," South Atlantic Bulletin 4 (1971): 14-20. Of value also is James

Baldwin, "Rendezvous with Life: An Interview with Countee Cullen," Magpie

26 (Winter 1942): 19-21. For an extensive discussion of Cullen’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.

Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00391.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Wed Mar 21 11:27:39 2001

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