A short life of the author
Countee Cullen (30 May 1903 – 9 January 1946) was an American poet of the Harlem Renaissance whose precocious debut collection, Color (1925), published when he was twenty-two years old, made him the most celebrated young Black poet in America. His mastery of traditional English verse forms — the sonnet, the ballad, the heroic couplet — deployed to explore the contradictions of race, faith, and identity, placed him at the centre of the New Negro movement and made him, for a brief period in the mid-1920s, the most famous Black literary figure in the United States.
Life
Cullen’s origins are obscure, and he preferred to keep them that way. He was probably born Countee LeRoy Porter in Louisville, Kentucky, or possibly in New York City — the details were never firmly established, and Cullen gave contradictory accounts. He was raised in Harlem by the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the largest congregations in Harlem, and his wife, Carolyn. Whether he was formally adopted or informally taken in is uncertain.
He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he won citywide poetry prizes, and then New York University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and published poems in major magazines — The Bookman, Harper’s, The American Mercury, Poetry — while still an undergraduate. He earned his M.A. from Harvard in 1926. In 1928, he married Yolanda Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, in the social event of the Harlem Renaissance, attended by 3,000 guests. The marriage was brief and unhappy; they divorced in 1930. Cullen spent two years in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship, returned to New York, and spent the last decade of his life teaching French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem. He died of uremic poisoning at forty-two.
Color (1925)
Cullen’s first collection was a sensation. It established the themes that would preoccupy his career: the tension between his identity as a Black man and his devotion to the European poetic tradition, the problem of a just God who permits racial suffering, and the beauty and burden of being “dark” in a world that values whiteness.
The poem “Heritage” — which opens with the question “What is Africa to me?” — is perhaps the defining poem of the Harlem Renaissance’s engagement with Africa, an extended meditation on the meaning of an ancestral continent that the poet has never seen. “Yet Do I Marvel” — a sonnet that concludes with the devastating couplet “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing” — condenses the entire racial dilemma of a Black artist working in white literary forms into fourteen lines.
“Incident” — eight lines in which a child’s encounter with racial hatred in Baltimore is rendered with nursery-rhyme simplicity — has become one of the most frequently anthologised American poems.
Subsequent Work
Copper Sun (1927) continued the themes of Color but with more love poetry and less explicit racial content, leading some critics to accuse Cullen of retreating from racial engagement. The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) was a narrative poem based on an English ballad, refracted through racial consciousness. The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) — whose title poem, a narrative about a lynching, attempts to find Christian meaning in racial violence — was his most ambitious and least successful work.
Cullen also wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), a satire of Harlem society that drew on his knowledge of the church and the Black bourgeoisie, and edited Caroling Dusk (1927), an important anthology of Black poetry.
The Debate with Langston Hughes
Cullen’s literary position was defined by his insistence that he wanted to be known as “a poet, not a Negro poet” — a stance that placed him in opposition to Langston Hughes, who championed a distinctively Black aesthetic rooted in blues, jazz, and vernacular speech. Cullen believed that the highest aspiration of a Black poet was to master the same forms that Keats and Shelley had mastered; Hughes believed that Black art should draw on Black life and Black musical traditions. This debate — form versus content, universalism versus particularism, European tradition versus African American innovation — remains central to discussions of Black literary identity.
Critical Standing
Cullen’s reputation declined after his death and especially during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, when his formalism and his identification with European tradition were seen as accommodationist. More recent scholarship has reassessed his work, arguing that his use of traditional forms was itself a radical act — an assertion of Black intellectual equality — and that the tension in his poetry between racial identity and literary tradition makes his work more interesting, not less.
Collecting Cullen
Color (1925, Harper & Brothers) in first edition with dust jacket brings $500–$2,000. Copper Sun (1927) brings $200–$600. Caroling Dusk (1927) brings $100–$400. Cullen died young and published relatively little; first editions are genuinely scarce.