Countee Cullen

Who Was Countee Cullen?

Countee Cullen was one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance — a poet whose formal mastery of the classical lyric tradition set him apart from his contemporaries and whose engagement with questions of race, faith, and doubt gave his work a theological depth that is often underappreciated. Born in 1903 — the exact circumstances of his early childhood remain obscure — he was adopted by the Reverend Frederick Cullen, a prominent Harlem Methodist minister, and raised in an atmosphere of African American church culture that would shape his imagination for the rest of his life.

His first collection, Color (1925), published when he was twenty-two, established him immediately as one of the most gifted poets of his generation. Its combination of classical formal control — sonnets, ballads, odes — with the specific experience of Black life in America produced poems of unusual power and unusual complexity.

Cullen is significant for TLA because his work wrestles more directly than that of almost any other Harlem Renaissance figure with the question of how a Black Christian can believe in a God who permits the suffering that racism produces. His most famous poem, “Yet Do I Marvel,” ends with the observation that the most curious thing God has done is to make a poet Black and bid him sing — a theological complaint that is also, simultaneously, an act of faith.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Color — 1925
• Copper Sun — 1927
• The Ballad of the Brown Girl — 1927
• The Black Christ — 1929
• On These I Stand — 1947 — posthumous selected poems