Entry 3 Countee Cullen

(May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) 

Countee [ con -tay ] Cullen

Countee Cullen was born on May 30, 1903 in New York City, Cullen was brought up in a Methodist parsonage. He went to De Witt Clinton High School in New York and started written work poetry  at fourteen years old. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His ballads were distributed in The Crisis, under the authority of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. He was not long after distributed in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won a few honors for his sonnet, "Melody of the Brown Girl," and moved on from New York University in 1923. That same year, Harper distributed his first volume of verse, Color, and he was confessed to Harvard University where he finished a graduate degree.

His second volume of verse, Copper Sun (1927), met with contention operating at a profit group on the grounds that Cullen did not give the subject of race the same consideration he had provided for it incolor. He was brought and instructed up in a principally white group, and he varied from different writers of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes in that he fail to offer the foundation to remark from individual encounter on the lives of different blacks or use well known dark topics in his composition. An inventive verse artist, he wrote in the convention of Keats and Shelley and was impervious to the new wonderful procedures of the Modernists. He passed on January 9, 1946.

Legacy

A posthumous collection of Cullen's poetry was published in 1947, On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen. His legacy also includes public schools named after the poet, as well as Harlem's 135th Street Branch library being renamed the Countee Cullen Library. After a period of dormancy, more attention has been paid by scholars to Cullen's life and writings, and in 2012 a biography of Cullen was published, And Bid Him Sing, by Charles Molesworth.