Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen's poetry was extremely motivated by race. He produced poetry that celebrates his African American Heritage, dramatizes black heroism, and reveals the reality of being black in a hostile world. In "Harlem Wine," Cullen reveals how blacks overcome their pain and rebellious inclinations through the medium of music (Shields 907). James Weldon Johnson said that Cullen was always seeking to free himself and his art from these bonds (Shields 905). In "Yet Do I Marvel," Cullen raises questions about the motivation God might have had in making a poet black in bidding him sing in a world that is fundamentally racist and that does not readily accept the creative work of African Americans (Shackleford 1013). Poems such as "Heritage," "The Black Christ," The Shroud of Color," "The Litany of the Dark People," and "Pagan Prayer" are the product of a writer who cannot reconcile his blackness (Early 170-171).
Cullen also used a lot of lyricism in his poetry to express his emotions. In his scholarly book of 1937, Negro Poetry and Drama, Sterling A. Brown, whose poems and essays continue to exert formidable influence on the black American culture, remarked that Countee Cullen's poetry is "the most polished lyricism of modern Negro Poetry." "Yet Do I Marvel," displays the poet during one of his most intensely lyrical, personal moments (Shields 905). There is certain simplicity in the lyricism of Cullen, showing his indebtedness to William Wordsworth's "language of the common man." Darwin Turner has commented that "Heritage" concerns the lyric cry of a civilized mind which cannot silence the memories of Africa that thrill the blood, of a heart which responds to rain (Shackleford 1014). Many of Cullen's most conventional lyrics also take on added dimensions when read as further orchestrations of his persistent blending of joy and suffering (Primeau 377).
Christianity is also a major theme in Cullen's literary work. In some of his greatest poems, he...
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