Cullen, Countée
Sex: Male
Born: Probably, Louisville, Kentucky, United States
30 May 1903
Died: New York, New York, United States
09 January 1946
Activity/Profession: Dramatist, Poet
(b. 30 May 1903; d. 9 January 1946),
poet, scholar, teacher, editor, playwright, and novelist. Cullen was born Countée Leroy Porter
most likely in Louisville, Kentucky. Exactly where he was born remains a mystery since there is
no extant birth certificate and Cullen himself claimed two cities as his birthplace at different
points in his life. On his application to New York University, he wrote that he was born in
Louisville. Cullen's second wife, Ida Mae Roberson, and his friends Langston Hughes and
Harold Jackman each said that Cullen also told them he was born there. After Cullen gained a
reputation as one of the most respected writers of the Harlem Renaissance, however, he claimed
on several occasions that he was born in New York City. Another mystery surrounding Cullen's
early years is his relationship with Amanda Porter, who raised him from his infancy, moving
with him to New York City when he was nine and caring for him until she died in October 1917.
Most scholars believe she was his grandmother, although how the two were related has not been
confirmed.
Cullen was taken in by Frederick Asbury Cullen, minister of the twenty-five-hundred-member
Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City, and his wife, Carolyn Belle Mitchell
Cullen, after Porter's passing. The Reverend and Mrs. Cullen were impressed by the teenager's
intelligence and good manners, and they set up a room for him in the church's fourteen-room
residence. While no records show that he was ever officially adopted, Countée Leroy Porter
changed his name to Countée Porter Cullen around 1921. (He dropped his middle name in 1925.)
He and the Reverend Cullen grew very close, sharing a deep love for books and literature.
Cullen was an outstanding student at DeWitt Clinton High School, which he attended from 1918
to 1922. He was elected to the school's honor society Arista, he edited the school's newspaper the
Clinton News, he helped edit the school's literary magazine Magpie, and as a freshman he started
writing poems. His poem “Song of the Poets,” first published in Magpie in 1918, celebrates the
great English poets he loved, such as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson, as well as
Paul Laurence Dunbar, who at the time was by far the most popular African American poet in
the country's history. Cullen's “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” written in response to Alan
Seeger's poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” won first prize in a New York City poetry
contest sponsored by the Empire Federation of Women's Clubs. After graduating from high
school, Cullen accepted a State Regents Scholarship and enrolled in New York University.
There, in addition to taking courses in Greek, Latin, French, English, math, philosophy, and the
sciences, he wrote most of the poems that were in his first three published collections. He won
second prize in the 1923 and 1924 Poetry Society of America's Witter Bynner undergraduate
poetry contests and won first prize in 1925. In addition he placed poems in such influential
journals as Opportunity, The Crisis, American Mercury, Poetry, Scribner's, Harper's, and Vanity
Fair. Cullen's first book, Color, was released in 1925, the same year he graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from New York University.
Color is divided into three sections and contains seventy-four poems, one-third of which
(including “Incident,” “Yet Do I Marvel,” and “Heritage”) address racial issues. Most of the
poems in Color are written in the forms—particularly the sonnet and ballad forms—frequently
used by the British Romantic poets he so greatly admired. Unlike other Harlem Renaissance
poets, such as Hughes and later Sterling Brown, Cullen did not integrate African American
dialect and the rhythms of jazz and the blues into his work. Doing so, Cullen believed, would put
more emphasis on his identity as an African American than as a writer. As he wrote in the
Brooklyn Eagle on 10 February 1924, he wanted to
"be POET and not NEGRO POET…. This is what has hindered the development of artists among
us. Their one note has been the concern with their race. That is all very well, none of us can get
away from it. I cannot at times. You will see it in my verse. The consciousness of this is too
poignant at times. I cannot escape it. But what I mean is this: I shall not write of negro subjects
for the purpose of propaganda. That is not what a poet is concerned with. Of course, when the
emotion rising out of the fact that I am a negro is strong, I express it. But that is another matter."
Furthermore Cullen said elsewhere that he did not believe that such material fit within the realm
of poetry. In a review published in the January 1926 issue of Opportunity magazine, Alain Locke
called Cullen a “genius!” He went on to proclaim that Color “transcends all of the limiting
qualifications that might be brought forward if it were merely a work of talent” (Locke, p. 14).
Praised by white and black critics because of its display of technical mastery and emotional
power, Color won the prestigious Harmon Foundation Literary Award.
Cullen earned more major literary awards than any other black writer of the 1920s. He received a
Guggenheim Fellowship, Poetry's John Reed Memorial Prize, and The Crisis magazine's Amy
Spingarn Award. By the time he completed his master's degree in English and French at Harvard
in 1926, he was one of the most popular African American writers. He took a job as an assistant
editor for the Urban League's Opportunity, for which he wrote a column entitled “The Dark
Tower.” In his column Cullen critiqued the state of contemporary African American literature by
way of book and theater reviews, commentaries, and critical essays, articulating what he saw as
the need for African American artists to represent their race in all of its complexities without
being confined to examining only race issues. During this time Cullen also prepared three book
manuscripts for publication, Caroling Dusk (1927), an anthology of thirty-eight African
American poets ranging from Dunbar in the late nineteenth century to the poets of the late 1920s,
and two collections of poems, Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927).
Caroling Dusk, which he edited, was hailed as an important contribution to African American
letters, and the two volumes of poetry were generally well received. Neither poetry volume was
seen, however, as an equal to Color. In a 1938 interview with Magpie, Cullen admitted that he
too liked Color more than his other poetry collections. In the same interview he deemed
“Heritage” his best poem.
To cap off what was perhaps the busiest time of his personal and professional lives, Cullen
married Nina Yolande Du Bois, the only child of the NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois, on 9
April 1928. The elaborate ceremony—called by many the social event of the decade in Harlem—
was conducted by the Reverend Cullen in Salem Methodist Church. Du Bois welcomed Cullen's
interest in his daughter, whom Cullen had met in the summer of 1923. Despite Yolande being
considered by some to be of modest intelligence, and despite her being quite open about her
infatuation with the jazz bandleader Jimmie Lunceford, Cullen went through with the ceremony,
even asking Hughes and Arna Bontemps to serve as ushers. Two months after the wedding,
Cullen left for Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing with his father and
Jackman. Yolande visited him in Paris in July, and during her visit the two agreed to end their
marriage.
Cullen spent two very satisfying years in Paris. He studied at the Sorbonne, met frequently with a
group of African American artists that included the sculptor Augusta Savage and the writer Eric
Walrond (to whom Cullen had dedicated “Incident”), and completed his fourth poetry collection,
The Black Christ and Other Poems, which was published in 1929 to lukewarm reviews. Most
critics saw the book as uneven and lacking the focus and intensity of Cullen's earlier work. He
admitted in a later interview to being often distracted while in France both by the disintegration
of his marriage and by the many experiences available on the streets of Paris.
While Cullen worked hard to be seen as a poet, rather than a black poet, he also worked to
present himself as a straight poet, rather than a homosexual or a bisexual one. While he did not
publicly disclose his homosexuality, Cullen had several affairs with men in both Harlem and
Paris. A close reading of his work, particularly poems such as “For a Poet,” “Fruit of the
Flower,” “The Shroud of Color,” “Spring Reminiscence,” and “Tableau,” reveals Cullen's use of
figurative language to address some of the frustrations he felt about not being able to express or
fully embrace that integral part of his identity. Cullen returned to the United States in 1930, when
he officially filed for divorce from his wife and began work on his only novel, One Way to
Heaven. Published in 1932, the book tells the story of Sam Lucas, a con artist, and Mattie
Johnson, a maid for a wealthy black family in Harlem. Despite no longer receiving
unconditionally glowing reviews of his work, Cullen remained popular on the lecture and
speaking circuits. For example, in 1931 he read from his work in seventeen states and in Canada.
Cullen turned down positions at several colleges to remain in New York City. He worked at first
as a substitute teacher, then beginning in 1934 as a French teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior
High School, where he taught until his death. Among his many hundreds of students was the
famous African American writer James Baldwin.
Cullen enjoyed teaching, although it slowed his writing productivity. He completed The Medea
and Some Poems, published in 1935, which consisted of eighteen new poems and his translation
of Euripides’ play. His was the first translation of a major play by a twentieth-century African
American writer. In 1940 he married Ida Mae Roberson. Cullen published two more books, The
Lost Zoo (1940), a children's book subtitled A Rhyme for the Young, but Not Too Young, and My
Lives and How I Lost Them (1942). Both books detail the adventures of his cat Christopher,
whom Cullen claimed helped write the stories. In fact My Lives and How I Lost Them is credited
to two authors: Christopher Cat and Countée Cullen.
At the time of his death from high blood pressure in 1946, Cullen was on the verge of
completing, with Bontemps, the script for a Broadway musical, St. Louis Woman, based on
Bontemps's novel God Sends Sunday. The show opened on 30 March 1946 and ran for four
months. Although he had largely turned his attention away from poetry, Cullen had prepared the
manuscript for On These I Stand, a collection of, in Cullen's opinion, his best poems. Published
posthumously in 1947, the book helped secure Cullen's place among the most talented writers of
the Harlem Renaissance.
Bibliography

Baker, Houston A., Jr. “A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee
Cullen.” In Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, pp. 45–

87. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Bontemps, Arna, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead,

1972.
Collier, Eugenia W. “I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen.” In Modern Black Poets, edited

by Donald B. Gibson, pp. 69–83. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
Cullen, Countee. On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen.

New York: Harper & Bros., 1947.
Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960.

Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.
Early, Gerald, ed. My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countée Cullen, Voice

of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Ferguson, Blanche E. Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance. New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1966.



Locke, Alain. “Color: A Review.” Opportunity 4 (January 1926): 14.
Lomax, Michael L. “Countee Cullen: From the Dark Tower.” PhD diss., Emory
University, 1984.
Perry, Margaret. A Bio-Bibliography of Countée P. Cullen, 1903–1946. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 1966.

Shucard, Alan R. Countee Cullen. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
CITATION FOR THIS SOURCE:
Donaghy, Daniel. "Cullen, Countée." Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From
the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Paul FinkelmanNew York: Oxford UP,
2008. Oxford African American Studies Center. Mon Dec 17 22:20:26 EST 2012.
<http://www.oxfordaasc.com/article/opr/t0005/e0320>.