Viewing page 434 of 440

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

THE COUNTEE CULLEN FOUNDATION
"...serving the artistic, cultural and educational betterment of mankind..."

COUNTEE CULLEN
(1903-1946)

[[image - Countee Cullen]]

Countee Cullen was born on May 30, 1903 in Louisville, Kentucky. Brought up in Harlem in the religious home life of his adopted parents, Reverend and Mrs. Frederick Cullen, he was to absorb the ideas and sensibilities of moral values and humanitarian faith which would ultimately enhance his writing abilities and his ambitions in life.

He experienced a remarkable series of early successes as a poet. At the age of fourteen he wrote his first free verse poem, "To A Swimmer," and began to blossom at DeWitt Clinton High School, where he continued to write and publish in the school's newspaper and literary magazine. By the time he graduated New York University in 1925, his first major volume of poetry, Color, was published. For this first volume of poetry, he won the Witter Bynner Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Other awards and successes followed, as Cullen gradually came to be recognized as "poet laureate" of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's. He received his Masters Degree from Harvard University. He became assistant editor of Opportunity Magazine from 1926-1928, and had the rare privilege of receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his education at the Sorbonne in France. 

Returning to New York after two years, Cullen poured his vast learning and concern for literature into teaching at Frederick Douglas [[Douglass]] Junior High School (PS #139) from 1930-1945 and declined prestigious offers to teach at such outstanding universities as Fisk University, Dillard University and others. Already published were Copper Sun (1927), Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928), The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), a body of poetry now recognized as a significant contribution not only to African-American literature but also American poetry in general. In the 1930's Cullen wrote One Way to Heaven (1932)and a translation of Euripedes [[Euripides]], The Medea (1935, which has been performed on stage by several theatrical groups. On These I Stand was published in 1947. 

Cullen's versatility was further revealed by his splendid group of children's books, The Lost Zoo (1940), and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942). At the time of his death in January, 1946, he was working with is fellow poet and novelist, Arna Bontemps, on St. Louis Woman (1946), adapting it for a Broadway musical, which did in fact open in March starring Pearl Bailey. 

But it is for his poetry that he will ultimately live, a poetry influenced by such masters as Keats, Tennyson and Houseman, but given spiritual depth and tragic tension by his personal identification with his race's history of suffering and affirmation in the face of bigotry. As he himself put it, "Somehow I find my poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys and sorrows—mostly of the latter—and of the heights and depths of emotion I feel as a Negro."

Cullen's educational contributions and literary achievements during his very brief lifetime are still being further assessed and appreciated by former students as well as by today's academic scholars and poetry readers with a unique kind of wonder about life, as stated in one of his poems: "Yet do I marvel at these curious things, to make a poet Black and bid him sing"


456