Countee Cullen Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes
| 6 Quotes | |
| Occup. | Poet |
| From | USA |
| Born | March 30, 1903 New York City, New York, United States |
| Died | January 9, 1946 New York City, New York, United States |
| Aged | 42 years |
Countee Cullen was born in 1903, with the precise place of his birth uncertain, and was raised in New York City. As a child he entered the household of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the influential pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, and Carolyn Belle Cullen. He eventually took their surname and grew up at the heart of Harlem's religious, civic, and cultural life. The Cullen home, connected to church and community leadership, offered a stable environment that put him in contact with the people and institutions that would shape his literary future.
Education and Formative Years
Cullen's talent emerged early. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he excelled academically, edited the school literary magazine, and began winning poetry prizes. He quickly found a wider audience through journals such as The Crisis, edited by figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, and through Opportunity, published by the National Urban League under Charles S. Johnson. At New York University he garnered major student awards, including the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize, and established himself as a leading young voice in American letters. He continued his studies at Harvard, earning a master's degree in 1926, refining a style influenced by the English Romantics and by French lyric poetry.
Entrance into the Harlem Renaissance
Cullen rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, alongside Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and others who transformed American literature in the 1920s. He contributed to Alain Locke's landmark anthology The New Negro and participated in a vibrant scene fostered by salons such as A'Lelia Walker's. Supported by the literary networks of The Crisis and Opportunity, and encouraged by elders like James Weldon Johnson, he rapidly became one of the most celebrated poets of his generation.
Poetic Vision and Major Works
From the outset Cullen favored traditional forms: sonnets, rhymed stanzas, and carefully patterned cadences reminiscent of John Keats and A. E. Housman. He used these classical forms to explore modern subjects, particularly the tension between beauty and injustice faced by Black Americans. His debut collection, Color (1925), brought him national acclaim and included poems that are now staples of American anthologies, such as Yet Do I Marvel, Heritage, and Incident. Copper Sun (1927) extended his lyrical range, while The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) experimented with narrative and religious allegory to confront racial terror and moral paradox. He also edited the important anthology Caroling Dusk (1927), which presented a broad array of Black poetic voices and helped canonize the Renaissance for later readers.
Public Debates and Aesthetics
Cullen's artistic credo emphasized universality in art. He often said he wanted to be seen as a poet rather than narrowly as a Negro poet, a position that placed him in a fruitful, sometimes contentious dialogue with contemporaries. Langston Hughes, in debating the role of race in art, urged a fuller embrace of Black vernacular expression, while Cullen insisted that mastery of inherited European forms could carry equally profound testimony. Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson welcomed the multiplicity of approaches, and Cullen's work demonstrated that formal elegance and racial conscience were not opposites but dynamic partners.
Beyond Poetry: Prose, Children's Verse, and Theater
Cullen expanded his range beyond lyric poetry. His novel One Way to Heaven (1932) portrayed Harlem life with humor and moral nuance. He also wrote for younger readers in The Lost Zoo (1940), a sequence of verse fables. In the 1940s he collaborated with Arna Bontemps on the book for the musical St. Louis Woman, adapted from Bontemps's novel God Sends Sunday, with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. This project linked Renaissance-era literary currents with midcentury American theater, a testament to Cullen's cross-genre ambitions.
Teaching and Mentorship
Beginning in the 1930s Cullen devoted himself to teaching in New York City, most notably at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem. In the classroom he championed disciplined craft and encouraged young writers to read widely. Among his students was James Baldwin, who later recalled the encouragement he received in those years. Cullen's school-based work anchored him in community life even as he continued to write and publish, and it reflected his belief that literature flourishes where institutions support youthful talent.
Personal Life
Cullen's personal life intersected with the era's leading figures. In 1928 he married Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, in a widely publicized Harlem wedding that symbolized the Renaissance's prominence. The marriage soon faltered and ended in divorce. In 1940 he married Ida Mae Roberson, with whom he shared a quieter domestic life. Throughout, he maintained close friendships within the literary world and remained loyal to the church and civic networks associated with Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and Carolyn Belle Cullen. He kept his private concerns largely out of public view and focused on work, mentorship, and craft.
Final Years and Death
In the 1940s Cullen balanced teaching with writing, occasional lecturing, and theatrical collaboration. Though the center of literary fashion shifted after the 1920s, he remained a respected figure and a sought-after presence at readings and community events. He died in New York City in 1946, reportedly from complications related to high blood pressure. His passing came just as St. Louis Woman moved toward the stage, closing a career that had begun at the very dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.
Legacy and Influence
Cullen's legacy rests on the elegance and moral force of his verse and on his role in shaping a generation of readers and writers. He demonstrated that traditional meter and rhyme could bear the weight of modern Black experience, and he helped institutionalize African American poetry through anthologies, reviews, and public appearances tied to The Crisis and Opportunity. The company he kept, W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset as early champions, Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson as critical interlocutors, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps as peers, and James Baldwin as a student, traces a remarkable arc of influence. His poems remain widely anthologized; they continue to be taught not only for their historical context but for their lyric intelligence, their humane irony, and their enduring music.
Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Countee, under the main topics: Faith - Life - Success - Heartbreak - Relationship.
Other people realated to Countee: James A. Baldwin (Author), Arna Bontemps (Poet), Carl Van Vechten (Writer)