Countee Cullen

American writer Alain Locke helped Cullen come to terms with his sexuality. Locke wanted to introduce a new generation of African-American writers, such as Countee Cullen, to the reading public. Locke also sought to present the authentic natures of sex and sexuality through writing, creating a kind of relationship with those who felt the same. Locke introduced Cullen to gay-affirming material, such as the work of Edward Carpenter, at a time when most gays were in the closet. In March 1923, Cullen wrote to Locke about Carpenter's work: "It opened up for me soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural".[14]

Critics and historians have not reached consensus as to Cullen's sexuality,[2] partly because Cullen was unsure himself. Cullen's first marriage, to Yolande Du Bois, experienced difficulties before ending in divorce.[15] He subsequently had relationships with many different men, although each ended poorly. Each relationship had a sense of shame or secrecy, such as his relationship with Edward Atkinson. Cullen later married Ida Robertson while potentially in a relationship with Atkinson. Letters between Cullen and Atkinson suggest a romantic interest, although there is no concrete evidence that they were in a sexual relationship.[16]

Cullen married Yolande Du Bois on April 9, 1928. She was the surviving child of W.E.B. Du Bois and his first wife Nina Gomer Du Bois, whose son had died as an infant.[17] The two young people were said to have been introduced by Cullen's close friend Harold Jackman.[18] They met in the summer of 1923 when both were in college: she was at Fisk University and he was at NYU.[19] Cullen's parents owned a summer home in Pleasantville, New Jersey near the Jersey Shore, and Yolande and her family were likely also vacationing in the area when they first met.[19]

While at Fisk, Yolande had a romantic relationship with Jimmie Lunceford, a jazz musician.[20] However, her father disapproved of Jimmie. The relationship ended after Yolande accepted her father's preference of a marriage to Cullen.[20]

The wedding was the social event of the decade among the African-American elite. Cullen, along with W.E.B. Du Bois, planned the details of the wedding with little help from Yolande.[17] Every detail of the wedding, including the rail car used for transportation and Cullen receiving the marriage license four days prior to the wedding day, was considered big news and was reported to the public by the African-American press.[17] His father, Frederick A. Cullen, officiated at the wedding.[21] The church was overcrowded, as 3,000 people came to witness the ceremony.[17]

After the newly wedded couple had a short honeymoon, Cullen traveled to Paris with his guardian/father, Frederick Cullen, and best man, Harold Jackman.[22] Yolande soon joined him there, but they had difficulties from the first.[21] A few months after their wedding, Cullen wrote a letter to Yolande confessing his love for men.[23] Yolande told her father and filed for divorce.[21] Her father wrote separately to Cullen, saying that he thought Yolande's lack of sexual experience was the reason the marriage did not work out.[24] The couple divorced in 1930 in Paris.[21] The details were negotiated between Cullen and Yolande's father W.E.B. Du Bois, as the wedding details had been.[17][25]

With the exception of this marriage before a huge congregation, Cullen was a shy person. He was not flamboyant with any of his relationships.[23] It was rumored that Cullen had developed a relationship with Harold Jackman, "the handsomest man in Harlem", which contributed to Cullen and Yolande's divorce.[23] The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite. According to Thomas Wirth, author of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, there is no evidence that the men were lovers, despite newspaper stories and gossip suggesting the contrary.[23] Scholars have not reached consensus on Cullen's sexuality. He married Ida Mae Roberson in 1940 and lived, apparently happily, with her until his death.

Jackman's diaries, letters, and outstanding collections of memorabilia are held in various depositories across the country, such as the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia. At Cullen's death, Jackman requested that his collection in Georgia be renamed, from the Harold Jackman Collection to the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection, in honor of his friend. After Jackman died of cancer in 1961, the collection at Clark Atlanta University was renamed as the Cullen-Jackman Collection to honor them both.[26]

The Harlem Renaissance movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem, in New York City, which had attracted talented migrants from across the country. During the 1920s, a fresh generation of African-American writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Other leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935). Writers benefitted by newly available grants and scholarships, and supported by such established white writers as Carl Van Vechten.

The Harlem Renaissance was influenced by a movement called Néegritude which represents “the discovery of black values and the Negro’s awareness of his situation”.[27] Cullen saw Negritude as an awakening of a race consciousness and black modernism that flowed into Harlem. Cullen's poetry “Heritage” and “Dark Tower” reflect ideas of the Negritude movement. These poems examine African roots and intertwine them with a fresh aspect of African American life.

Countee Cullen's work intersects with the Harlem community and such prominent figures of the Renaissance as Duke Ellington and poet and playwright Langston Hughes. Ellington admired Cullen for confronting a history of oppression and shaping a new voice of “great achievement over fearful odds”.[28] Cullen maintained close friendships with two other prominent writers, Hughes and Alain Locke. However, Hughes critiqued Cullen, albeit indirectly, and other Harlem Renaissance writers, for the “desire to run away spiritually from [their] race”.[29] Hughes condemned “the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”[29] Though Hughes critiqued Cullen, he still admired his work and noted the significance of his writing.

The social, cultural, and artistic explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance was the first time in American history that a large body of literary, art and musical work was contributed by African-American writers and artists. Countee Cullen was at the epicenter of this new-found surge in literature. Cullen considered poetry to be raceless.[31] However, his poem "The Black Christ" took on a racial theme, exploring a black youth convicted of a crime he did not commit. "But shortly after in the early 1930s, his work was almost completely [free] of racial subject matter. His poetry instead focused on idyllic beauty and other classic romantic subjects."[31]

Cullen worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, "The Dark Tower", increased his literary reputation. Cullen's poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) explored similar themes as Color, but they were not so well received. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad.

Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen traveled back and forth between France and the United States. By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. The title poem of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery; Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Jesus.

The grave of Countee Cullen in Woodlawn Cemetery. (The stone is shared with Robert L. Cooper, the second husband (1953-1966) of Cullen's wife Ida.[32])

As well as writing books, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But by 1930 Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. In 1932 his only novel was published, One Way to Heaven, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City.

From 1934 until the end of his life, he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City. During this period, he also wrote two works for young readers: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals who were killed in the Flood, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat. Along with Herman W. Porter, he also provided guidance to a young James Baldwin during his time at the school.

In the last years of his life, Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. He worked with Arna Bontemps to adapt Bontemps's 1931 novel God Sends Sunday as the musical St. Louis Woman (1946, published 1971). for Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both white. The Broadway musical, set in a poor black neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans. In another stretch, Cullen translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was published in 1935 as The Medea and Some Poems, with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.[33]

Several years later, Cullen died from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946.[33] He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.[34]

The Countee Cullen Library, a Harlem branch location of the New York Public Library, was named in his honor. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Due to Cullen's mixed identity, he developed an aesthetic that embraced both black and white cultures.[5] He was a firm believer that poetry surpassed race and that it could be used to bring the races closer together.[4] Although race was a recurring theme in his works, Cullen wanted to be known as a poet not strictly defined by race.

Countee Cullen developed his Eurocentric style of writing from his exposure to Graeco-Roman Classics and English Literature, work he was exposed to while attending prestigious universities like New York University and Harvard.[35] In his collection of poems To the Three for Whom the Book Cullen uses Greek methodology to explore race and identity and writes about Medusa, Theseus, Phasiphae, and the Minotaur.[35] Although Cullen's continued to develop themes of race and identity in his work, Cullen found artistic inspiration in ancient Greek and Roman literature.

Cullen was also influenced by the Romantics and studied subjects of love, romance, and religion.[35] John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay both influenced Cullen's style of writing.[35] In Caroling Dusk, an anthology edited by Cullen, he expands on his belief of using a Eurocentric style of writing. He writes, "As heretical as it may sound, there is the probability that Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than form the nebulous atavistic yearnings towards an African inheritance."[35] Countee Cullen believed that African-American poets should work within the English conventions of poetry to prove to white Americans that African Americans could participate in these classic traditions.[5] He believed using a more traditional style of writing poetry would allow African-Americans to build bridges between the black and white communities.[4]

• Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties: Anthology of Black Verse. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927.

• African-American literature
• Harlem Renaissance

• Huggins, Nathan (2007). Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-506336-3.
• Molesworth, Charles (2012). And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-53364-3.
• Perry, Margaret (1971). A Bio-bibliography of Countée P. Cullen, 1903-1946. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation. ISBN 978-0-8371-3325-6.
• Shucard, Alan R. (1984). Countee Cullen. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-7411-5.

• Works written by or about Countee Cullen at Wikisource
• Countee Cullen: The Poetry Foundation
• Countee Cullen - Poets.org, from the Academy of Academic Poets: Countee Cullen
• Modern American Poetry: Countee Cullen
• Poets of Cambridge U.S.A.: Countee Cullen
• Petri Liukkonen. "Countee Cullen". Books and Writers
• Countee Cullen at Find a Grave