Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American firmament and then sank toward the horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in 1918, the 15-year-old Countee LeRoy Porter was taken into the home of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem’s largest congregation. There the young Countee entered the approximate center of black politics and culture in the United States and acquired both the name and awareness of the influential clergyman who was later elected president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Of the six identifiable racial themes in Cullen’s poetry, the first is Négritude, a pervasive international black literary movement, which included what scholar Arthur P. Davis in a 1953 Phylon essay called “the alien-and-exile theme.” Specific examples of this motif in Cullen’s poetry include his attribution of descent from African kings to the girl featured in The Ballad of the Brown Girl as well as the submerged pride exhibited by the waiter in the poem “Atlantic City Waiter” whose graceful movement resulted from “Ten thousand years on jungle clues.” Probably the best-known illustration of the Pan-African impulse in Cullen’s poetry is found in “Heritage,” where the narrator realizes that although he must suppress his African heritage, he cannot ultimately surrender his black heart and mind to white civilization. “Heritage,” like most of the Négritude poems of the Harlem Renaissance and like political expression such as Marcus Garvey’s popular back-to-Africa movement, powerfully suggests the duality of the black psyche—the simultaneous allegiance to America and rage at her racial inequities

Probably more than any other writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen carried out the intentions of black American intellectual leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson. These men had nothing but the highest praise for Cullen, for he was brilliantly practicing what they advocated, and he came close to embodying Alain Locke’s “New Negro.” “In a time,” DuBois wrote in a 1928 Crisis essay, “when it is vogue to make much of the Negro’s aptitude for clownishness or to depict him objectively as a serio-comic figure, it is a fine and praiseworthy act for Mr. Cullen to show through the interpretation of his own subjectivity the inner workings of the Negro soul and mind.” Johnson was pleased with Cullen’s decision not to recognize “any limitation to ‘racial’ themes and forms.” In Cullen’s wish not to be “a negro poet,” Johnson insisted, the writer was “not only within his right: he is right.” As these authorities attest, to read Countee Cullen’s work is to hear a voice as representative of the Harlem Renaissance as it is possible to find.

Taken from: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/countee-cullen

Cullen Quotes

Countee Cullen reads “Heritage”