{"id":176433006,"date":"2014-02-28T02:01:45","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T08:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176433006"},"modified":"2014-02-28T02:01:45","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T08:01:45","slug":"literature-countee-cullen-and-the-racial-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2014\/02\/28\/literature-countee-cullen-and-the-racial-mountain\/","title":{"rendered":"LITERATURE: Countee Cullen and the Racial Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"

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March 27, 2013<\/p>\n

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\"Photograph:<\/a>

Photograph: Countee Cullen \/ Photography by Carl Van Vechten, Courtesy of The Van Vechten Trust<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

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Countee Cullen and <\/span><\/h1>\n

the Racial Mountain<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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By\u00a0Major Jackson<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cCountee Cullen and the Racial Mountain\u201d is adapted from the introduction to\u00a0<\/em>Countee Cullen: Collected Poems<\/a>, edited by Major Jackson and published this month by The Library of America. \u00a9 2013 by Literary Classics of America. Used with permission. The book will be the most comprehensive edition ever published of Cullen\u2019s work, including uncollected and unpublished poems<\/em>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

From Phillis Wheatley right up to our own ostensibly \u201cpostracial\u201d moment, African American poets have had to bear a seemingly inescapable burden. Above and beyond the usual demands and privileges of the poetic vocation\u2014for those fortunate enough to have been allowed to write poetry at all, and to have succeeded in the struggle\u2014their work has had to do a kind of double duty. For black poets, merely wrestling with words and the mysteries of existence hasn\u2019t been considered enough, unless their efforts have also addressed race itself\u2014unless they have come to terms in one way or another, as poets, with their \u201cblackness.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This burden is evident in the apparent paradox of what is probably Countee Cullen\u2019s most famous couplet, from his first volume,\u00a0Color<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:<\/span>
\nTo make a poet black, and bid him sing!<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even as Cullen\u2019s speaker marvels at the fact of his calling his also hesitates, noting that \u201cpoet\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d seem a \u201ccurious\u201d or even potentially antithetical combination. These lines question and affirm simultaneously: a black poet discovers, quizzically but not unhappily, that he is both, and in doing so silences any doubt that the two terms belong together. And yet the speaker\u2019s momentary befuddlement at the idea that black people might write poetry also suggests a consciousness not quite at ease in its own skin. He marvels at himself, just as Phillis Wheatley\u2019s interlocutors marveled at her some hundred and fifty years earlier, refusing to believe she had actually written her poems until she was able to answer their questions about them in person. And so, along with love, death, beauty, the absurdity of life, and whatever else, race becomes an obligatory theme for Cullen and for black American poets more generally. And their handling of \u201crace,\u201d among some critics and readers, becomes a matter of major or even peremptory concern.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cullen\u2019s career is a case in point rather than an exception to this rule. In his lifetime and after, his writings have been by turns excessively praised or prejudicially discounted, not so much for their particular literary merits or failings, but for the ways in which they address broader debates about race in American culture. Some, like W.E.B. Du Bois, sought to boost Cullen less for his art alone than for what his art would prove about African American character. Others, like Langston Hughes and many after him, suspected Cullen of aspiring to a kind of whiteness in his poetic practice\u2014even as his poems articulate a unique vision of the joys and trials of being black, male, and some would vigorously add \u201cgay\u201d in early twentieth-century America.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a publishing career that spanned over twenty years, Cullen produced a body of work that included not only five volumes of poetry\u2014Color<\/em>\u00a0(1925),\u00a0Copper Sun<\/em>\u00a0(1927),\u00a0The Black Christ, and Other Poems<\/em>\u00a0(1929),\u00a0The Medea, and Some Poems<\/em>\u00a0(1935), and the collected\u00a0On These I Stand<\/em>\u00a0(1947)\u2014but also a novel,\u00a0One Way to Heaven<\/em>\u00a0(1931); two children\u2019s books,\u00a0The Lost Zoo<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0My Nine Lives and How I Lost Them<\/em>; and the musical play\u00a0St. Louis Woman<\/em>\u00a0(1946), his collaboration with poet and novelist Arna Bontemps. His translation of Euripides\u2019s\u00a0Medea<\/em>\u00a0is considered the first major translation of a classical work by a black American writer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such varied and lasting achievements speak for themselves. And yet it is difficult to appreciate them fully without some understanding of the ways in which debates about the role of the black artist are impressed on their very texture, and of how Cullen himself bore the pressures of exemplarity conferred on him in the wake of his early successes. They inform his language as surely as any metrical pattern or rhyme scheme. And yet I do not believe that Cullen\u2019s poems should be reduced to mere ciphers\u2014in an argument, say, about the history of African American self-representation in a racist nation. After all such arguments are done and forgotten, Cullen\u2019s poems will still be able to give great pleasure on their own terms. Fortified by his deep awareness of the Bible and English literature, not to mention the classical and French writers he loved to translate, and stimulated by the technical challenges of his chosen medium, Cullen left a body of poetry that offers us, if nothing else, a curious, marvelous, and singular self-portrait.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/span><\/h4>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>\"cullen<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n


\nCullen\u2019s early years are as obscure, in their own way, as Phillis Wheatley\u2019s African origins. He kept the true circumstances of his birth a secret from all but a few close friends and deliberately rewrote his past. Officially, he was Countee Cullen, or sometimes rather stylishly\u00a0Count\u00e9e<\/em>. (He dropped the accent for his published books of poetry, but used it in personal correspondence; it appears on his tombstone.) Born in New York (he often claimed), Countee Cullen came to be known as the son of one of Harlem\u2019s most influential men, the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen, pastor of the famed Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and his wife Carolyn. He was raised in the parsonage of the church\u2014a fine structure, still standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 129th Street, at the epicenter of many Harlem happenings. Along with the physical and emotional stability of a loving home, the Cullens provided a solid, conservative Christian upbringing. They were on the upper end of Harlem\u2019s burgeoning middle class.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, Cullen was probably born Countee Lucas, in Louisville, Kentucky or thereabouts, on May 30, 1903. In 1940, according to his widow Ida Mae Roberson, he attended and paid for the Louisville funeral of his mother, Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. But the two seem to have had little contact. Extreme poverty or some local scandal may have forced her to give him up; we can only speculate. He was raised by a grandmother or family friend, Amanda Porter, in the New York area. In 1918, a year after she died, he was unofficially adopted by the Cullens\u2014perhaps because he had shown himself to be a particularly bright student at an early age. As he grew older, Countee began to question some of the more unreconstructed values and manners of his foster parents, but he remained a dutiful son until the end. Well into adulthood, he accompanied the Rev. Cullen on nearly annual summer trips, to Europe or the Holy Land, and after Carolyn Cullen died, he took his father in. He was evidently grateful for all they had given him. Yet they also provided him, like many parents, with an ample dose of psychic tension\u2014a tension that would come into play in his writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cullen sometimes rhapsodized over African scenes, offering exotic visions of magical, pantheistic worship in dark humid jungles.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Describing himself in a biographical note to\u00a0Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets<\/em>\u2014a groundbreaking Harlem Renaissance anthology he edited in 1927\u2014Cullen offered a wry, telling account of his conflicted state: \u201cCount\u00e9e Cullen\u2019s chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination.\u201d\u00a0Pagan<\/em>\u00a0is a densely loaded term here. On the most polite level, it indicates Cullen\u2019s tendency, in his poetry, toward a kind of Keatsian sensualism. Instead of the moral strictures or exhortations one might find in a properly \u201cChristian\u201d poet\u2014and indeed Cullen\u2019s father perennially urged him to write more poems in an explicitly devotional, religious mode\u2014Cullen is more often interested in gorgeous imagery, or in the pleasures of the sounds of words for their own sake. (Critics have identified Keats as one of Cullen\u2019s primary influences, and indeed Cullen\u2019s tone often strikes one as exceptionally Keatsian. His lyrics often address the principal themes one associates with Keats: beauty, love, mortality. But what might be called Cullen\u2019s Keatsianism is intertwined and melded with other thematic concerns\u2014particularly race, and wrestling with issues of doubt and faith. Cullen\u2019s \u201cChristian upbringing\u201d shows through, throughout his writings.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Cullen\u2019s use of\u00a0pagan\u00a0may also raise the possibility that he sensed or wondered, as an African American poet, about some essential persistence of what Phillis Wheatley called \u201cmy\u00a0Pagan<\/em>\u00a0land\u201d\u2014an African past, or a specifically racial heritage, that would perhaps cut against the proprieties of his American, Christian life. Cullen sometimes rhapsodized over African scenes, offering exotic visions of magical, pantheistic worship in dark humid jungles. In \u201cHeritage,\u201d he interrogates and examines the claims such visions ought to have on him. At one point he notes his distance from the \u201cpagan\u201d past:<\/span><\/p>\n

Here no bodies sleek and wet,<\/span>
\nDripping mingled rain and sweat,<\/span>
\nTread the savage measures of<\/span>
\nJungle boys and girls in love.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Writing from the parsonage of Salem Methodist Episcopal, in his strictly iambic and certainly never \u201csavage\u201d measures, Cullen is by turns fascinated by, distressed over, and even occasionally embarrassing in his enthusiasm for what he imagines of \u201cpre-Christian\u201d Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pagan<\/em>\u00a0may also hint, at a more deeply coded level, of some self-awareness of homosexual identity. Gay writers and theorists beginning around the turn of the nineteenth century often turned to ancient Greece as a way to find their roots and imagine a less encumbered future, just as many black writers turned to Africa. Cullen avidly followed both of these intellectual developments, reading and making contacts with proponents of both. In 1922, writing to Alain Locke\u2014a leading Howard University intellectual and fellow traveler in both camps\u2014he described his response to the gay utopian Edward Carpenter\u2019s Greek-themed\u00a0Iol\u00e4us<\/em>\u00a0(1908):<\/span><\/p>\n

I read it through at one sitting, and steeped myself in its charming and comprehending atmosphere. It opened up for me soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural. I loved myself in it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout his poetry, and perhaps also in his private life, Cullen tentatively explored the \u201cpagan\u201d side of his divided identity, and questioned some of the orthodoxies within which he was raised. But from the beginning Cullen was a poet with a public reputation\u2014a kind of prodigy, whose works were noticed and held up for praise. If he attempted to reconcile the \u201cChristian\u201d and \u201cpagan\u201d elements of his personality, it was in poems intended for the widest possible public consumption, not a coterie audience. The burdens of exemplarity began early. In high school\u2014the almost exclusively white DeWitt Clinton High School, where he served as the editor of the school newspaper and assistant editor to the school\u2019s literary magazine\u00a0The Magpie\u2014he began to be recognized for his literary talents. He won his first of many contests, a citywide competition sponsored by the Federation of Women\u2019s Clubs, with his poem \u201cI Have a Rendezvous with Life\u201d (1920)\u2014a poetic reply to Alan Seeger\u2019s then-popular poem of World War I, \u201cI Have a Rendezvous with Death\u201d (1917). It begins:<\/span><\/p>\n

I have a rendezvous with life,<\/span>
\nIn days I hope will come,\u00a0<\/span>
\nEre youth has sped and strength of mind;<\/span>
\nEre voices sweet grow dumb;<\/span>
\nI have a rendezvous with life,<\/span>
\nWhen spring\u2019s first heralds hum.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though not perhaps a poem for the ages\u2014only five years later, when he published his first book,\u00a0Color<\/em>, Cullen omitted this early work\u2014\u201cI Have a Rendezvous\u201d marked an auspicious beginning. In its moment, the poem was a minor hit, published in New York\u2019s (white) daily newspapers, and soon reprinted in magazines and anthologies. One writer, Gaius Glenn Atkins, borrowed Cullen\u2019s phrase for the title of his own book,\u00a0A Rendezvous with Life<\/em>\u00a0(1922). Indeed, Cullen scholar Gerald Early has suggested that Cullen\u2019s precocious debut\u2014rather than, say, the publication of Jean Toomer\u2019s\u00a0Cane\u00a0in 1923\u2014ought to mark the beginning of what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. This may seem a heavy weight of expectation to rest on a poem that is nothing if not light and cheerful, but it accurately reflects the eagerness with which young black writers were being looked to for signs of uplift and revitalization.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was the appearance of his poem \u201cThe Shroud of Color\u201d in H. L. Mencken\u2019s\u00a0American Mercury<\/em>\u00a0in November 1924 that first propelled Cullen onto the national literary scene and made him one of the most talked about black writers in the country. He \u201cbecame famous, like Byron, overnight,\u201d Mencken later recalled. The 199-line poem, mainly in iambic rhyming couplets, begins with a speaker in crisis. \u201c[B]eing dark,\u201d he \u201ccannot bear\u201d to go on living, and very melodramatically throws himself, groaning, onto the Earth, asking God to let him die. God instead reveals a vast cosmic vision\u2014a vision which enables him to understand his suffering as a source of strength, and to find solidarity in the suffering of his people:<\/span><\/p>\n

And somehow it was borne upon my brain<\/span>
\nHow being dark, and living through the pain<\/span>
\nOf it, is courage more than angels have. I knew<\/span>
\nWhat storms and tumults lashed the tree that grew<\/span>
\nThis body that I was, this cringing I<\/span>
\nThat feared to contemplate a changing sky,<\/span>
\nThis that I grovelled, whining, \u201cLet me die,\u201d<\/span>
\nWhile others struggled in Life\u2019s abattoir.<\/span>
\nThe cries of all dark people near or far<\/span>
\nWere billowed over me, a mighty surge<\/span>
\nOf suffering in which my puny grief must merge<\/span>
\nAnd lose itself; I had no further claim to urge<\/span>
\nFor death; in shame I raised my dust-grimed head,<\/span>
\nAnd though my lips moved not, God knew I said,<\/span>
\n\u201cLord, not for what I saw in flesh or bone<\/span>
\nOf fairer men; not raised on faith alone;<\/span>
\nLord, I will live persuaded by mine own.<\/span>
\nI cannot play the recreant to these;<\/span>
\nMy spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The poem struck many readers as a tour de force, not only for its perspective on race relations in America but for the virtuosity with which it cast the struggle and plight of \u201call dark people,\u201d both aesthetically and thematically, in high Miltonic terms. It is a kind of blues poem, written in the key of\u00a0Paradise Lost<\/em>. It not only discovers and asserts a sense of racial solidarity, but does so in a grand and \u201cepic\u201d manner, against the presumptions of a white audience. Cullen\u2019s diction alone seems a repudiation of racist typecasting, and goes out of its way to insist on his seriousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"cullen<\/a>
\nCullen\u2019s debut volume,\u00a0Color<\/em>, was published by Harper & Row in 1925, the year he graduated from New York University. It was perhaps the most auspicious and long-awaited first book in African American literature, and it sold more than two thousand copies in its first two years in print. It confirmed what many, seeing his poems in magazines, had already begun to suspect: Cullen was one of the major writers of his generation, another star in the expanding literary universe that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, along with figures like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. As a result of his resolve to master the high literary tradition of poetry, Cullen emerged in the mid-1920s critically acclaimed by both black and white readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cullen\u2019s desire to be read as \u2018a poet and not a Negro poet\u2019 was condemned as black aristocratic self-hatred.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It is little wonder, given Cullen\u2019s then-prominence, that two of the most enduring critical statements from the Harlem Renaissance on the function of African American creative expression should take Cullen as their starting point: Du Bois\u2019 \u201cCriteria of Negro Art\u201d and Langston Hughes\u2019 \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.\u201d Cullen was celebrated as the golden exemplar of a campaign by black political and cultural leaders who sought to engineer a new image of black people in America. Yet he was also targeted as an aesthete, and his expressed desire to be read as \u201ca poet and not a Negro poet\u201d was increasingly condemned as representative of black aristocratic self-hatred, and worse, a veiled longing \u201cto be white.\u201d To his critics, it did not matter or help that Cullen wrote some of the most formally adept American verse of the decade. Instead, his poems engaged traditional (read \u201cwhite\u201d) literary modes with altogether too much enthusiasm, and seemed sponsored in sound and sense by a bygone era. His penchant for penning pitch-perfect sonnets and jaunty ballad stanzas (so accomplished that he would later pick up the nickname \u201cthe Black Keats\u201d) was both blessing and curse in an age that had stopped its metronome and begun to favor the various iconoclasms of modernism over mastery of tradition, and the raw potential of black vernacular forms over seemingly exhausted Anglo-American gentilities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Du Bois\u2014the leading black intellectual of the early twentieth century and recognized leader of what he called \u201cthe Talented Tenth\u201d\u2014valued Cullen\u2019s literary achievements and example immensely, for they signaled the arrival of a black man who could play the English language like a song and engage with literary tradition as well as any white poet. In an address delivered in June 1926 at the Chicago Conference of the NAACP, Du Bois recounted the story of a University of Chicago professor who recited an excerpt of a poem and then asked his literature students to identify the author. Du Bois reports: \u201cThey guessed a goodly company from Shelley and Robert Browning to Tennyson and Masefield. The author was Count\u00e9e Cullen.\u201d One can almost hear Du Bois\u2019 near swoon, his self-satisfied pride at Cullen being mistaken for some of the most celebrated white poets in English literature. These conference remarks would be published later that year as \u201cCriteria of Negro Art\u201d in the NAACP\u2019s official magazine\u00a0The Crisis<\/em>, of which Du Bois served as editor; they would come to be a touchstone in debates over the role and purpose of the arts in the African American struggle for civil rights and social equality. \u201cI do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,\u201d Du Bois\u2019 proclaimed, and he celebrated black art for its unique role in promoting the truth of human equality and unmasking the lie of white supremacy. That Cullen\u2019s poetry could so easily be confused with that of Shelley or Browning or Tennyson confirmed for Du Bois some of his most closely held beliefs. He doggedly believed African Americans were equal to their white countrymen in all aspects of life, and Cullen was consummate proof.<\/span><\/p>\n

James Weldon Johnson\u2014poet, diplomat, and central member of the Talented Tenth\u2014proposes a similar role for the black poet in the preface to his groundbreaking anthology,\u00a0The Book of American Negro Poetry<\/em>\u00a0(1922). Like Du Bois, Johnson articulates the high yield black leaders expected of their artists and writers:<\/span><\/p>\n

No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior. The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In short, according to the these representatives of the Talented Tenth, Cullen and other Harlem Renaissance poets were to be held responsible\u2014not only for counting syllables and contemplating the themes they wished to contemplate, but for the ways in which their efforts would lift up the race, and help to change the country\u2019s attitudes about African Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n

To understand Du Bois\u2019s and Johnson\u2019s zeal for such a programmatic view of black art and their excitement over what they viewed as the import of Cullen\u2019s poetic achievement\u2014Johnson, too, promoted Cullen and his career\u2014one must keep in mind some of the battles they were fighting, from Harlem, as Cullen was coming of age in the late 1910s and early 1920s. For generations, a campaign of fear and racial violence had been waged against African Americans\u2014an ugly scar on the American psyche which saw thousands of black people lynched, shot, or burned, in a horrific reign of brutality. Resistance to this campaign was necessarily ongoing. In the wake of D. W. Griffith\u2019s\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0in 1915, the KKK had reemerged. In 1922, the Dyer anti-lynching bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime, passed the House of Representatives but was blocked by white Southerners in the Senate. Against the backdrop of these and many similar incidents, Du Bois and other concerned African Americans (including Cullen\u2019s foster father, who organized anti-lynching protests and traveled to Washington to petition President Wilson in the wake of a race riot), found determination and purpose in substantiating black people\u2019s humanity above the status of hunted animals to be dragged up a tree and left to swing long after the mob had dissipated. \u201cNegro Art,\u201d in such circumstances, could not exist for its own sake. It became a weapon, and a shield, against organized oppression.<\/span><\/p>\n

One must realize, too, the particular appeal that highly decorous and elevated language would have had for Du Bois and other black critics. The black vernacular traditions that were just beginning to fascinate younger writers in the 1920s, like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, could easily have seemed tainted, corrupt, or degrading, because they had been so thoroughly co-opted in racist white popular entertainments. For generations, the image of the Jim Crow \u201cminstrel\u201d and its many subsequent variations and iterations had presented black folk as simple-minded, uncouth, happy-go-lucky, and quick to a tune. Such dehumanizing stereotypes had found their way into the culture they parodied and mocked. Even a poet as proficient and accomplished as Paul Laurence Dunbar had had to \u201cwear the mask\u201d that others expected of him, writing in folksy dialect to appeal to white readers. Propriety and formality were antidotes to years of misrepresentations which reveled in the contrary. As Alain Locke put it in 1925, in his essay \u201cEnter the New Negro\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n

The day of \u201caunties,\u201d \u201cuncles\u201d and \u201cmammies\u201d is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on, and even the \u201cColonel\u201d and \u201cGeorge\u201d play barnstorm roles from which they escape when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cullen helped put such fictions on the scrap heap. In a rave review of\u00a0Color<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a0The Crisis<\/em>, Du Bois singles out Cullen\u2019s ability to move beyond such simple typecasting:<\/span><\/p>\n

In a time when it is the vogue to make much of the Negro\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Always impeccably tailored, Cullen was not only an antitype of the minstrel show buffoon in his personal demeanor: his literary style seemed freshly free of the melodramatic, role-playing masks that Dunbar, Locke, and Du Bois lamented. It was a style transparent to his \u201cinner workings,\u201d true to his dignity, rather than a performance put on for others. In 1925, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from NYU, then went on to earn a master\u2019s degree in English and French from Harvard University, which made him, as one critic has noted, the most considerably educated black poet in America. He was also one of the most lauded, winning a succession of national prizes including the Witter Bynner Poetry contest, the John Reed Memorial Prize from\u00a0Poetry<\/em>\u00a0magazine, and the Amy Spingarn Award of the\u00a0Crisis<\/em>\u00a0magazine, among others. He did this not only without affecting a \u201cserio-comic\u201d or other sham-vernacular voice, but indeed in verse that owed more, it can be argued, to English literary tradition than to any American vernacular whatsoever, black or white. As other Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer began to participate in the avant-garde literary movements now known as modernism, Cullen pursued traditional forms with particular enthusiasm, writing not only ballads and sonnets and Spenserian stanzas, but also becoming, according to Robert Hillyer, the first American to publish a poem (\u201cTo Lovers of Earth: Fair Warning\u201d) in the antique, Chaucerian \u201crime royal.\u201d He was a formalist\u2019s formalist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Called a \u2018traitor\u2019 to his race, Cullen asserts the common, transcendent, human relevance of his themes.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Members of the Talented Tenth were committed to celebrating Cullen\u2019s accomplishments, and he became a kind of standard-bearer for the race. Probably no one rejoiced more in Cullen\u2019s successes than Du Bois; indeed, his regard for the young poet was so high that he encouraged him to take his daughter\u2019s hand in marriage. The wedding of Countee Cullen and Nina Yolande Du Bois, on April 9, 1928, is now legendary for its extravagance. Langston Hughes later remembered it, in\u00a0The Big Sea<\/em>(1940), as \u201cthe social-literary event of the season, and very society.\u201d Officiated by the groom\u2019s father at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church\u2014the large hall filled to capacity, and hundreds of uninvited onlookers crowding the streets outside\u2014it represented a symbolic passing of the torch from the old guard of black political leaders to the new crop of young black artists and writers in attendance, the force and energy behind much of the fervor and excitement of the Harlem Renaissance. With his multiple accomplishments, Cullen offered exactly the kind of image that the Talented Tenth wished to project, and indeed immediately following the wedding, he took time out to address a race rally, postponing his honeymoon. He was at the height, perhaps, of his public career.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, the wedding was more show than substance. Yolande, it is rumored, would have preferred to marry Jimmie Lunceford\u2014a jazz musician with whom she is reported to have been infatuated. Cullen had already begun to understand himself as attracted to other men. They soon divorced, in 1930. Langston Hughes\u2014who chafed, at the wedding, in his rented tux\u2014was beginning to stake out his own distinct claims to the title of black laureate, and to seek new directions for African American poetry. Hughes and Cullen had been friends early in their roughly contemporary poetic careers, and they remained on relatively good terms throughout their lives, though they were competitors; they had many common friends and influences, including Howard professor Alain Locke. But in his landmark essay \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,\u201d which appeared in\u00a0The Nation<\/em>\u00a0in the same month as Du Bois\u2019s Chicago conference address, Hughes spurned Cullen\u2019s, and indeed black elites\u2019 \u201cdesire to run away spiritually from [their] race.\u201d He noted with palpable antipathy \u201cthis urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.\u201d And though he refrained from directly naming Cullen and instead spoke of \u201cone of the most promising of the young Negro poets\u201d who wished to be identified as a \u201cpoet\u2014not a Negro poet,\u201dthe example of Cullen and his career was his point of departure. (Cullen had proclaimed defiantly in a 1924 interview in the\u00a0Brooklyn Daily Eagle<\/em>: \u201cIf I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.\u201d As poet Gregory Pardlo has recently observed, Hughes leaves Cullen unmentioned partly because \u201cit is polite to do so,\u201d but also because he finds Cullen\u2019s admission \u201cso damaging.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

In Hughes\u2019s view, Cullen\u2019s insistence on distinguishing himself as a raceless artist amounts to a suicide of the self and becomes the obstruction that prevents Cullen from making a fierce and unapologetic contribution to American literature, one steeped in and informed by the living culture of his people. Hughes would certainly have endorsed the aspirations expressed in Johnson\u2019s\u00a0Book of American Negro Poetry<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without . . . a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He looked forward\u2014in \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain\u201d\u2014to a time when race would leave free expression unobstructed:<\/span><\/p>\n

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn\u2019t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn\u2019t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Hughes and Cullen were competitors, of sorts, for the prize of principal African American poet of their generation, Cullen may have had an early lead, and during the later 1920s and early 1930s they were often discussed in tandem. Over time, Hughes has arguably become the more canonical of the two (even as a handful of Cullen\u2019s poems continue to be widely anthologized and read); his openness to modernism gave him an edge, as did his exploration and embrace of African American folk traditions. Hughes ultimately expanded the range of possibilities and set new standards for what African American poetry and indeed any poetry could sound like. Cullen, in his way, can sometimes sound like Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he admired immensely; not only \u201cwhite,\u201d if one must, but even whiter, and even as race was a frequent theme. Hughes\u2019s reservations about what might be called the defensive propriety of Cullen\u2019s diction have to some extent stuck in the reception history of Harlem Renaissance poetry. As black writers during the Harlem Renaissance and the remainder of the twentieth century increasingly explored the literary possibilities of black vernaculars, Cullen\u2019s work came to seem a less vital part of African American tradition, an impressive but unproductive cul-de-sac.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cullen could not have been unaware of the aspersions Hughes had cast on his work. Indeed, his poem \u201cTo Certain Critics\u201d\u2014included in his book\u00a0The Black Christ<\/em>\u00a0(1929)\u2014offers a pointed response. Cullen\u2019s locution (\u201ccertain critics\u201d) leaves Hughes unnamed, just as Hughes avoided naming Cullen\u2014the poet who secretly wished to be white\u2014in \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.\u201d But while Cullen\u2019s poem is open to broader interpretations, Hughes would certainly be a plausible addressee:<\/span><\/p>\n

Then call me traitor if you must,<\/span>
\nShout treason and default!<\/span>
\nSay I betray a sacred trust<\/span>
\nAching beyond this vault.<\/span>
\nI\u2019ll bear your censure as your praise,<\/span>
\nFor never shall the clan<\/span>
\nConfine my singing to its ways<\/span>
\nBeyond the ways of man.<\/span><\/p>\n

No racial option narrows grief,<\/span>
\nPain is no patriot,<\/span>
\nAnd sorrow plaits her dismal leaf<\/span>
\nFor all as lief as not.<\/span>
\nWith blind sheep groping every hill,<\/span>
\nSearching an oriflamme,<\/span>
\nHow shall the shepherd heart then thrill<\/span>
\nTo only the darker lamb?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Called a \u201ctraitor\u201d to his race, Cullen asserts the common, transcendent, human relevance of his themes. Grief, pain, and sorrow belong to all. And with a forceful pun, he pushes back and shames the faction\u2014\u201cthe clan\u201d\u2014that would limit his artistic freedom on racial grounds.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/span><\/h4>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"cullen<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All of these debates around the \u201cracial mountain\u201d\u2014as essential as they are and as ongoing as many of the issues are\u2014can seem claustrophobic and distorting, from the perspective of over eighty-five years later. They have the effect of encouraging us to neglect whole landscapes of poetry\u00a0not\u00a0notably or necessarily overdetermined by the turbulent long foreground of African American history, or to read too narrowly. I invite the reader to take pleasurein Cullen\u2019s many distinctive merits, often little explored or still undiscovered. He is a poet of impudent humor (especially evident in his \u201cEpitaphs\u201d). Later in life\u2014in poems newly published or collected here for the first time\u2014he adopted a stridently political voice that may surprise those already familiar with his poetry, and should dispel the mistaken notion that Cullen, in spite of his occasional claims to the contrary, was \u201capolitical.\u201d Above all, he knows how to hammer the quickness of thought into the turns of form. The astute reader attuned to Cullen\u2019s rhetorical gifts will pay special attention to such turning. He is the poet of \u201cYet\u201d and \u201cBut\u201d\u2014of insights that spark between his lines as well as in them. He would certainly have understood Ralph Waldo Emerson\u2019s edict: \u201cit is not meters, but a meter making argument that makes a poem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cullen was addicted to fashioning such arguments, and sought his own brand of freedom in pattern and form. He is as dexterous, in his way, as his \u201cAtlantic City Waiter,\u201d from\u00a0Color<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

With subtle poise he grips his tray<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Of delicate things to eat;<\/span>
\nChoice viands to their mouths half way,<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The ladies watch his feet<\/span><\/p>\n

Go carving dexterous avenues<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Through sly intricacies;<\/span>
\nTen thousand years on jungle clues<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Alone shaped feet like these.<\/span><\/p>\n

For him to be humble who is proud<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Needs colder artifice;<\/span>
\nThough half his pride is disavowed,<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In vain the sacrifice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sheer through his acquiescent mask<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of bland gentility,<\/span>
\nThe jungle flames like a copper cask<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Set where the sun strikes free.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It may help to know that Cullen worked, one summer, as a waiter in Atlantic City; he wrote his friend Langston Hughes from there, complaining about his co-workers but expressing pride in the poems they had inspired. Of course, the \u201cpride\u201d here (self-esteem? animal group? sexual desire?), and the punning \u201cfeet,\u201d are also Cullen\u2019s (throughout? in part?), and this portrait \u201cflames\u201d even brighter as self-portrait. But is it a poem about race? sex? class? poetry? Is it \u201cpagan\u201d or \u201cChristian,\u201d and how well reconciled are these tendencies? Like its subject, the poem twists and turns while carrying a complex load, and is a kind of show-stopper. But what exactly happens in it? Cullen is simply too \u201csly\u201d here and elsewhere to be denigrated as a poet who would \u201cwrite white\u201d or (on the flip side) be content with mere propaganda in the service of racial uplift. He is a complex and sometimes a real virtuoso performer. Like his waiter on tables, he deserves to be closely watched.<\/span><\/p>\n

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>via:\u00a0http:\/\/www.bostonreview.net\/poetry-books-ideas\/countee-cullen-and-racial-mountain<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n

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March 27, 2013         Countee Cullen and the Racial Mountain By\u00a0Major Jackson \u00a0   \u201cCountee Cullen and the Racial Mountain\u201d is adapted from the introduction to\u00a0Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, edited by Major Jackson and published this month by The Library of America. \u00a9 2013 by Literary Classics of America. Used with permission. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[6],"tags":[4,12,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176433006"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176433006"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176433006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176433012,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176433006\/revisions\/176433012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176433006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176433006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176433006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}