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Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=56

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Countee Cullen including a biography, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cullen/cullen.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Countee Cullen.

BIOGRAPHY

In the 1920s, Countee Cullen became a primary figure of the Harlem Renaissance and one of its major poetic talents. Born in 1903, he was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle Cullen and brought up in New York City in what the poet later described as "the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage." Such early religious influences, however ambivalently portrayed, are pronounced in Cullen's signature poem "Heritage" and in the lyrics included in The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). After graduating in the top of his class at DeWitt Clinton High School in 1921, Cullen attended New York University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1925. While at NYU, Cullen wrote poetry prolifically and showed an early mastery of traditional English measures in ballad stanzas, sonnets, and other fixed forms. In the mid-1920s, many of these works would appear in his early volumes of verse: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) which brought him the recognition of the modern literary world in such awards as the Witter Bynner Poetry prize, Poetry magazine's prestigious John Reed Memorial Prize, Crisis magazine's Amy Spingarn Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His literary fame was further capped in his highly publicized New York marriage to Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of noted black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. Their union proved short-lived, however, and they were divorced two years later. Cullen's productivity as a writer fell off somewhat in the 1930s owing to his teaching responsibilities as a French instructor at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, but he published a retrospective parody of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel One Way to Heaven (1932) and another volume of verse The Medea and Other Poems (1935) that included a major translation of Euripides' tragedy. In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Roberson and at the time of his death six years later he was collaborating with Arna Bontemps on the play St. Louis Woman (1946).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Baker, Houston A. A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974.

Corti, Lillian. "Countee Cullen's Medea." African American Review. 32 (4): 621-34.

Gibson, Donald B., Ed. Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973.

Perry, Margaret. A Bio-Bibliography of Countee P. Cullen, 1903-46. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1971.

Powers, Peter. "'The Singing Man Who Must Be Reckoned With': Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countee Cullen." African American Review. 34 (4): 661-78.

Shucard, Alan. Countee Cullen. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER