I lived from 1903-1946.
I was from the United States, and am in the Americas category.
I influenced poet Jesse Redmond Fauset.
I was influenced by poet James Weldon Johnson.
Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was raised in a Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen.
An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley.
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In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. He was soon after published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won several awards for his poem, "Ballad of the Brown Girl," and graduated from New York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published his first volume of verse, Color, and he was admitted to Harvard University where he completed a master's degree.
His second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy in the black community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in Color.
He was raised and educated in a primarily white community, and he differed from other poets of the Harlem Renaissance like 'Langston Hughes' in that he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing.
An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists. He died in 1946.
Countee Cullen's second wife Ida renewed many of the copyrights on his work when the publishers copyrights expired. However given the length of time that has passed we now believe that even this renewal has expired and it is in the public domain.
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What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
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Once riding in old Baltimore,
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Locked arm in arm they cross the way
The black boy and the white,
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We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
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She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores
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With two white roses on her breasts,
White candles at head and feet,
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Some are teethed on a silver spoon,
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This is not water running here,
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That brown girl's swagger gives a twitch
To beauty like a Queen,
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All through an empty place I go,
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