Countee Cullen.

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Robert E. Fleming ◽  
Alan R. Shucard
Keyword(s):  
Countee Cullen

The Poetic Philosophy of Countee Cullen

1940 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Bertram L. Woodruff
Keyword(s):  
Countee Cullen

scholarly journals The Indictment of God and the American Society in Countee Cullen’s Poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Onwu Uko Gabriel
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Countee Cullen ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Intolerance

The concept that God is as unjust as the society is so eloquently portrayed in Countee Cullen’s poems “Yet Do I Marvel’’ and “Incident”. Cullen accuses God of being unjust by making him a poet. The renowned poet does not exonerate his American society from the indictment based on racial hostilities and insensitivity that seemed to have permeated the milieu. This paper addresses the questions of the indictment, racial intolerance and the significance of Cullen’s poetry to American literature. To achieve the objective of this study, the author adopts interpretive literary study and The Reader-Response approach to analyze the selected poems. The study reveals that Cullen’s poetry like other genres lives in timeless performance, is therapeutic, is a strong vehicle for the mobilization of people, and a tool for protest. The study concludes that Countee Cullen uses his poetry to indict God and American society. From the analysis of the selected poems, it is observed that poetry lives with people, is a weapon for change in any Nation and Cullen’s poetry addresses the contemporary needs of a society. His accusation of God and American society is a concern and seems relevant. What matter most is equality, justice and love for humanity? All these ingredients must emanate from the heart and transcend color for any society to attain oneness.

New Negro and Genteel Protest

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Second Step ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
Countee Cullen ◽  
Gradual Transformation ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Scholarly accounts of the Harlem Renaissance often foreground its politically radical and aesthetically innovative aspects. This tends to obscure the continuing strength of genteel ideas in African American writing of the period. This chapter traces the productivity of the sonnet during the Harlem Renaissance to its productive revisions of the genteel tradition. Drawing on a range of previously neglected poems, it situates Claude McKay’s epochal “If We Must Die” against the gradual transformation of the protest sonnet over the 1910s. In a second step it shows how genteel conventions shaped the subversive variety of protest that Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson explored from the mid-twenties. The ambivalent position of the sonnet in between gentility and protest, the chapter argues, is behind the difficulties that scholars like Houston A. Baker have faced in assessing the interplay of formal mastery and deformative self-assertion in the Harlem Renaissance sonnet.

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