Countee Cullen (1903–1946)

Little is known about Countee Cullen’s early life. Although he claimed to have been born in New York City, various sources who were close to him have alternately indicated that he was born in Louisville, Kentucky, or Baltimore, Maryland. In any case, Cullen, always a private person, never definitively resolved the question. Raised by his paternal grandmother as Countee Porter, Cullen was apparently adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen after she died when he was around fifteen. Reverend Cullen was an activist pastor of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, which was home to a large congregation in Harlem. He eventually became head of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so Cullen found himself living at one of the focal points of the black cultural and political movements near the very beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.

Cullen published his first book of poems, Color, in 1925, the year he graduated from New York University. This edition included a number of what were to become his major poems, some of which were simultaneously featured in Alain Locke’s The New Negro. This remarkable success transformed an extraordinarily talented student into an important poet whose literary reputation was celebrated nationally as well as in Harlem. In 1926, he earned a master’s degree in English and French from Harvard and subsequently began writing a column for Opportunity, the publication of the National Urban League, in which he articulated his ideas about literature and race. After publishing two more volumes of poetry in 1927, Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to write poetry in France, one of many literary prizes he was awarded. His fourth collection of poetry, The Black Christ and Other Poems, appeared in 1929. Having achieved all of this, he was only twenty-six years old.

By the end of the decade, Cullen was considered a major poet of the black experience in America. Owing to his early interest in Romantic writers — John Keats was a favorite inspiration — he was also read for his treatment of traditional themes concerning love, beauty, and mutability. As he made clear in his 1927 anthology of verse showcasing black poets, he was more interested in being part of “an anthology of verse by Negro poets, rather than an anthology of Negro verse.” In a poem titled “To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time (1925),” he pledges his allegiance to a Romantic poetic tradition; consider this excerpt:

“John Keats is dead,” they say, but I

Who hear your full insistent cry

In bud and blossom, leaf and tree,

Know John Keats still writes poetry.

Though Cullen habitually wrote about race consciousness and issues related to being black in an often-hostile world, he insisted on being recognized for his credentials as a poet rather than for his race, and he did so writing in traditional English forms such as the sonnet and other closed forms that he had studied in college and graduate school. He was critical of the free verse that writers like Langston Hughes coupled with the blues and jazz rhythms, as they moved away from conventional rhyme and meter (see the Perspective “On Racial Poetry” by Cullen). Refusing to be limited by racial themes, he believed that other blacks who allowed such limitations in their work did so to their artistic disadvantage. The result was that his poetry was popular among whites as well as blacks in the 1920s.

As meteoric and brilliant as Cullen’s early writing career had been, it faded almost as quickly in the 1930s. Despite publication of a satiric novel, One Way to Heaven (1932); The Media and Some Poems (1935); two books for juveniles in the early 1940s; and several dramatic and musical adaptations, his reputation steadily declined as critics began to perceive him as written out, old-fashioned, and out of touch with contemporary racial issues and the realities of black life in America. His conservative taste in conventional poetic forms was sometimes equated with staunch conservative politics. There can be no question, however, that his most successful poems are firmly based in an awareness of the social injustice produced by racism. Cullen was offered a number of opportunities teaching at the college level, but his overall influence waned as he chose in 1934 to teach French and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem, where he worked until his poor health resulted in an early death in 1946.

Yet Do I Marvel 1925

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. How does the speaker envision the nature of God in lines 1–8?
2. Research the Tantalus and Sisyphus allusions. Why are these Greek myths particularly relevant in the context of the poem?
3. How do you interpret the meaning of awful in line 12?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Compare the view of God in “Yet Do I Marvel” with the perspective offered by the speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “I know that He exists.”

Incident 1925

Once riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,

I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small.

And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

That’s all that I remember.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What does the young narrator learn from this “incident”?
2. Why do you think Cullen chose to use the word whit in line 6?
3. Discuss the effects of the poem’s rhymes.

Connection to Another Selection

1. Compare the psychological effects of racism as expressed in this poem and in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Prejudice.”

Heritage 1925

(For Harold Jackman)

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who all day long

Want no sound except the song

Sung by wild barbaric birds

Goading massive jungle herds,

Juggernauts of flesh that pass

Trampling tall defiant grass

Where young forest lovers lie,

Plighting troth beneath the sky.

So I lie, who always hear,

Though I cram against my ear

Both my thumbs, and keep them there,

Great drums throbbing through the air.

So I lie, whose fount of pride,

Dear distress, and joy allied,

Is my somber flesh and skin,

With the dark blood dammed within

Like great pulsing tides of wine

That, I fear, must burst the fine

Channels of the chafing net

Where they surge and foam and fret.

Africa? A book one thumbs

Listlessly, till slumber comes.

Unremembered are her bats

Circling through the night, her cats

Crouching in the river reeds,

Stalking gentle flesh that feeds

By the river brink; no more

Does the bugle-throated roar

Cry that monarch¹ claws have leapt

From the scabbards where they slept.

Silver snakes that once a year

Doff the lovely coats you wear,

Seek no covert in your fear

Lest a mortal eye should see;

What’s your nakedness to me?

Here no leprous flowers rear

Fierce corollas² in the air;

Here no bodies sleek and wet,

Dripping mingled rain and sweat,

Tread the savage measures of

Jungle boys and girls in love.

What is last year’s snow to me,

Last year’s anything? The tree

Budding yearly must forget

How its past arose or set —

Bough and blossom, flower, fruit,

Even what shy bird with mute

Wonder at her travail there,

Meekly labored in its hair.

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who find no peace

Night or day, no slight release

From the unremittant beat

Made by cruel padded feet

Walking through my body’s street.

Up and down they go, and back,

Treading out a jungle track.

So I lie, who never quite

Safely sleep from rain at night —

I can never rest at all

When the rain begins to fall;

Like a soul gone mad with pain

I must match its weird refrain;

Ever must I twist and squirm,

Writhing like a baited worm,

While its primal measures drip

Through my body, crying, “Strip!

Doff this new exuberance.

Come and dance the Lover’s Dance!”

In an old remembered way

Rain works on me night and day.

Quaint, outlandish heathen gods

Black men fashion out of rods,

Clay, and brittle bits of stone,

In a likeness like their own,

My conversion came high-priced;

I belong to Jesus Christ,

Preacher of humility;

Heathen gods are naught to me.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

So I make an idle boast;

Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,

Lamb of God, although I speak

With my mouth thus, in my heart

Do I play a double part.

Ever at Thy glowing altar

Must my heart grow sick and falter,

Wishing He I served were black,

Thinking then it would not lack

Precedent of pain to guide it,

Let who would or might deride it;

Surely then this flesh would know

Yours had borne a kindred woe.

Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,

Daring even to give You

Dark despairing features where,

Crowned with dark rebellious hair,

Patience wavers just so much as

Mortal grief compels, while touches

Quick and hot, of anger, rise

To smitten cheek and weary eyes.

Lord, forgive me if my need

Sometimes shapes a human creed.

All day long and all night through,

One thing only must I do:

Quench my pride and cool my blood,

Lest I perish in the flood.

Lest a hidden ember set

Timber that I thought was wet

Burning like the dryest flax,

Melting like the merest wax,

Lest the grave restore its dead.

Not yet has my heart or head

In the least way realized

They and I are civilized.

• ¹ 39 monarch: Lion.

• ² 47 corollas: Crowns (of petals).

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. The speaker repeats a question: “What is Africa to me?” Is there ever a coherent answer? If so, does it change over the course of the poem?
2. Discuss the use of italics in the poem.
3. Look for imagery that relates to the speaker’s mind and imagery that relates to his body. How different are these? Are they ever reconciled?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Compare the attitude toward African culture in this poem and in Phillis Wheatley’s “To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works.”

Perspectives

Karen Jackson Ford (b. 1956)

Hughes’s Aesthetics of Simplicity 1992

The repression of the great bulk of Hughes’s poems is the result of chronic critical scorn for their simplicity. Throughout his long career, but especially after his first two volumes of poetry (readers were at first willing to assume that a youthful poet might grow to be more complex), his books received their harshest reviews for a variety of “flaws” that all originate in an aesthetics of simplicity. From his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), to his last one, The Panther and the Lash (1967), the reviews invoke a litany of faults: the poems are superficial, infantile, silly, small, unpoetic, common, jejune, iterative, and, of course, simple.¹ Even his admirers reluctantly conclude that Hughes’s poetics failed. Saunders Redding flatly opposes simplicity and artfulness. “While Hughes’s rejection of his own growth shows an admirable loyalty to his self-commitment as the poet of the ‘simple, Negro commonfolk’ … it does a disservice to his art.”² James Baldwin, who recognizes the potential of simplicity as an artistic principle, faults the poems for “tak[ing] refuge … in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience.”³

Despite a lifetime of critical disappointments, then, Hughes remained loyal to the aesthetic program he had outlined in 1926 in his decisive poetic treatise, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” There he had predicted that the common people would “give to this world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself,” a poet who would explore the “great field of unused [folk] material ready for his art” and recognize that this source would provide “sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.”⁴ This is clearly a portrait of the poet Hughes would become, and he maintained his fidelity to this ideal at great cost to his literary reputation.

From “Do Right to Write Right: Langston Hughes’s Aesthetics of Simplicity,” Twentieth Century Literature 38.4 (1992)

• ¹ Reviews in which these epithets appear are collected in Edward J. Mullen, Critical Essays on Langston Hughes (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). [Ford’s note.]

• ² Redding’s comments appear in Mullen 74. [Ford’s note.]

• ³ Baldwin’s comments appear in Mullen 85. [Ford’s note.]

• ⁴ The Nation 122 (1926): 692. [Ford’s note.]

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. What was Hughes’s rationale for the value of simplicity in his poetry?
2. Explain whether or not you think there is any justification for regarding Hughes’s poetry as “superficial” and too “simple.”

David Chinitz (b. 1962)

The Romanticization of Africa in the 1920s 1997

In Europe black culture was an exotic import; in America it was domestic and increasingly mass-produced. If postwar [World War I] disillusionment judged the majority culture mannered, neurotic, and repressive, Americans had an easily accessible alternative. The need for such an Other produced a discourse in which black Americans figured as barely civilized exiles from the jungle, with — so the clichés ran — tom-toms beating in their blood and dark laughter in their souls. The African American became a model of “natural” human behavior to contrast with the falsified, constrained, and impotent modes of the “civilized.”

Far from being immune to the lure of this discourse, for the better part of the 1920s Hughes asserted an open pride in the supposed primitive qualities of his race, the atavistic legacy of the African motherland. Unlike most of those who romanticized Africa, Hughes had at least some firsthand experience of the continent; yet he processed what he saw there in images conditioned by European primitivism, rendering “[the land] wild and lovely, the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees tall, the sun bright, and the rivers deep.”¹ His short story “Luani of the Jungle,” in attempting to glorify aboriginal African vigor as against European anemia, shows how predictable and unextraordinary even Hughes’s primitivism could be. To discover in the descendants of idealized Africans the same qualities of innate health, spontaneity, and naturalness requires no great leap; one has only to identify the African American as a displaced primitive, as Hughes does repeatedly in his first book, The Weary Blues:

They drove me out of the forest.

They took me away from the jungles.

I lost my trees.

I lost my silver moons.

Now they’ve caged me

In the circus of civilization.²

Hughes depicts black atavism vividly and often gracefully, yet in a way that is entirely consistent with the popular iconography of the time. His African Americans retain “among the skyscrapers” the primal fears and instincts of their ancestors “among the palms in Africa.”³ The scion of Africa is still more than half primitive: “All the tom-toms of the jungles beat in my blood, / And all the wild hot moons of the jungles shine in my soul.”⁴

From “Rejuvenation through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism and Jazz,” in American Literary History, Spring 1997

• ¹ The Big Sea. 1940. N.Y.: Thunder’s Mouth, 1986, 11. [Chinitz’s note.]

• ² The Weary Blues. N.Y.: Knopf, 1926, 100. [Chinitz’s note.]

• ³ Ibid. 101.

• ⁴ Ibid. 102.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. According to Chinitz, why did Europeans and Americans romanticize African culture?
2. Consider McKay’s “The Tropics in New York” and Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the context of Chinitz’s discussion of “primitivism,” and discuss the similarities and differences you see in their approaches.

Alain Locke (1886–1954)

Review of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze: A Book of Verse 1923

One of Mrs. Johnson’s literary virtues is condensation. She often distills the trite and commonplace into an elixir. Following the old-fashioned lyric strain and the sentimentalist cult of the common emotions, she succeeds because by sincerity and condensation, her poetry escapes to a large extent its own limitations. Here in the subject of these verses, there is however a double pitfall; avoiding sentimentality is to come dangerously close to propaganda. This is also deftly avoided — more by instinct than by calculation. Mrs. Johnson’s silences and periods are eloquent, she stops short of the preachy and prosaic and is always lyrical and human. Almost before one has shaped his life to “Oh! the pity of it,” a certain fresh breeze of faith and courage blows over the heart, and the mind revives to a healthy, humanistic optimist. Mrs. Johnson seems to me to hear a message, a message that gains through being softly but intensely insinuated between the lines of her poems — “Let the traditional instincts of women heal the world that travails under the accumulated woes of the uncompensated instincts of men,” or to speak more in her way, “May the saving grace of the mother-heart save humanity.”

From Crisis, February 1923

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. What does Locke admire about Johnson’s poems? How positive do you think his assessment is of her poetry?
2. What do you think Locke means when he writes, “avoiding sentimentality is to come dangerously close to propaganda”?
3. Explain whether you think Johnson avoids sentimentality in the poems reprinted in this chapter.

Countee Cullen (1903–1946)

On Racial Poetry 1926

Here is a poet with whom to reckon, to experience, and here and there, with that apologetic feeling of presumption that should companion all criticism, to quarrel.

What has always struck me most forcibly in reading Mr. Hughes’ poems has been their utter spontaneity and expression of a unique personality…. This poet represents a transcendently emancipated spirit among a class of young writers whose particular battle-cry is freedom. With the enthusiasm of a zealot, he pursues his way, scornful, in subject matter, in photography, and rhythmical treatment, of whatever obstructions time and tradition have placed before him. To him it is essential that he be himself. Essential and commendable surely; yet the thought persists that some of these poems would have been better had Mr. Hughes held himself a bit in check….

If I have the least powers of prediction, the first aside of this book, The Weary Blues, will be most admired, even if less from intrinsic poetical worth than because of its dissociation from the traditionally poetic. Never having been one to think all subjects and forms proper for poetic consideration, I regard these jazz poems as interlopers in the company of the truly beautiful poems in other asides of the book. They move along with the frenzy and electric heat of a Methodist or Baptist revival meeting, and affect me in much the same manner. The revival meeting excites me, cooling and flushing me with alternate chills and fevers of emotion; so do these poems. But when the storm is over, I wonder if the quiet way of communing is not more spiritual for the God-seeking heart; and in the light of reflection I wonder if jazz poems really belong to that dignified company, that select and austere circle of high literary expression which we call poetry….

Taken as a group the selections in this book seem one-sided to me. They tend to hurl this poet into the gaping pit that lies before all Negro writers, in the confines of which they become racial artists instead of artists pure and simple. There is too much emphasis here on strictly Negro themes; and this is probably an added reason for my coldness toward the jazz poems — they seem to set a too definite limit upon an already limited field.

From Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. In Cullen’s review of The Weary Blues, what is his “quarrel” (para. 1) with Hughes?
2. Given the tenor of Hughes’s comments on racial pride in the excerpt from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” what do you think his response to Cullen would be?
3. Explain why you agree or disagree with Cullen’s view that Hughes’s poems are “one-sided” (para. 4).
4. Do you think Cullen’s argument is dated, or is it relevant to today’s social climate?

Onwuchekwa Jemie (b. 1940)

On Universal Poetry 1976

Hughes entertained no doubts as to the sufficiency and greatness of the molds provided by black music, nor of black life as subject matter. On the question of whether such black matter and manner could attain “universality,” Hughes in his Spingarn Speech issued a definitive answer:

There is so much richness in Negro humor, so much beauty in black dreams, so much dignity in our struggle, and so much universality in our problems, in us — in each living human being of color — that I do not understand the tendency today that some American Negro artists have of seeking to run away from themselves, of running away from us, of being afraid to sing our own songs, paint our own pictures, write about ourselves — when it is our music that has given America its greatest music, our humor that has enriched its entertainment media, our rhythm that has guided its dancing feet from plantation days to the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, and currently the Madison….

Could you possibly be afraid that the rest of the world will not accept it? Our spirituals are sung and loved in the great concert halls of the whole world. Our blues are played from Topeka to Tokyo. Harlem’s jive talk delights Hong Kong. Those of our writers who have concerned themselves with our very special problems are translated and read around the world. The local, the regional can — and does — become universal. Sean O’Casey’s Irishmen are an example. So I would say to young Negro writers, do not be afraid of yourselves. You are the world.¹

Hughes’s confidence in blackness is a major part of his legacy, for the questions he had to answer have had to be answered over again by subsequent generations of black artists. Black culture is still embattled; and Hughes provides a model for answering the questions and making the choices. Whether they say so or not, those who, like Cullen, … plead the need to be “universal” as an excuse for avoiding racial material, or for treating such material from perspectives rooted in alien sensibilities, invariably equate “white” or “Western” with “universal,” and “black” or “non-Western” with its opposite, forgetting that the truly universal — that is, the foundation elements of human experience, the circumstances attending birth, growth, decline, and death, the emotions of joy and grief, love and hate, fear and guilt, anger and pain — are common to all humanity. The multiplicity of nations and cultures in the world makes it inevitable that the details and particulars of human experience will vary according to time, place, and circumstance, and it follows that the majority of writers will dramatize and interpret human life according to the usages of their particular nation and epoch. Indeed, the question whether a writer’s work is universal or not rarely arises when that writer is European or white American. It arises so frequently in discussions of black writers for no other reason than that the long-standing myth of white superiority and black inferiority has led so many to believe that in literature, and in other areas of life as well, the black particular of universal human experience is less appropriate than the white particular.

From Langston Hughes: An Introduction to Poetry

• ¹ See Hughes, Letter to the Editor, The Crisis, 35:9 (September 1928), 302.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. How does Jemie go beyond Hughes’s own argument to make a case for the universality of poetry about black experience?
2. How might Jemie’s argument be extended to other minority groups or to women?
3. Do you think that Jemie’s or Cullen’s argument is more persuasive? Explain your answer.

Suggested Topics for Longer Papers

1. Discuss the four poets’ use of rhyme, meter, and sounds in eight poems of your choice. How do these elements contribute to the poems’ meanings?
2. Taken together, how do the four poets’ poems provide a critique of relations between blacks and whites in America?
3. Do some exploratory reading, viewing, and listening to learn more about life in Harlem in the 1920s. Based on your research, how effectively do you think Hughes’s poetry evokes Harlem life?