A posthumous collection, On These I Stand (1947), appeared two years after his death.Īt the age of 21, Cullen employed the standard English ballad stanza for "Incident," an impromptu but sturdy memoir of meeting a vulgar, impudent boy his own age. He was eulogized at his father's church and buried at Woodlawn Cemetery. Rehearsals were in progress at the time of Cullen's death on January 9, 1946, at Sydenham Hospital in the Bronx. Louis Woman (1946), the play is the basis for the Broadway musical for which Vernon Duke provided music. As his health deteriorated from hypertension, he composed light verse, including The Lost Zoo (1940), about the animals that Noah failed to load, and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942), based on the activities of his pet, Christopher Cat.įollowing a lecture engagement at Fisk University in 1940, Cullen returned to Harlem to collaborate on an adaptation of Arna Bontemps' novel God Sends Sunday (1931). He edited Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927) and produced the clumsy, stilted novel One Way to Heaven (1932), a blend of vigorous characterization and leaden satire. The staging never materialized, but Cullen published the text in The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935). The second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris at the Sorbonne and wrote The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), a mediocre, self-conscious volume unworthy of his better efforts.Ĭullen turned to prose by reworking Euripides' tragedy Medea. While teaching French and creative writing at Frederick Douglass High School in New York City, Cullen published two volumes of conventional poetry: Copper Sun (1927), which he dedicated to wife Yolande, and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). In addition, he flourished with the column "The Dark Tower," which far outlasted a marriage doomed by Yolande's frivolity and his covert homosexuality. A post as assistant editor for Opportunity (1926-1928) was significant to Cullen's literary ripening. in English literature from Harvard in 1926 and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W. "Heritage" remains a masterpiece of the era's joy in a long-subdued African past.Ĭullen earned an M.A. He launched his literary career as an undergraduate with Color (1925), a youthful triumph based on classical forms and introduced by "Yet Do I Marvel," one of his most anthologized titles. in literature from New York University, he completed his studies with a thesis on the verse of Edna St. That same year, editor Jessie Redmon Fauset lauded his verse in Crisis, the NAACP magazine.Ī self-confident go-getter during the heady days of Harlem's creative surge, Cullen asserted his voice in the Harlem Writers Guild, a significant Harlem symposium of young artists. His first submission to national journals was "To a Brown Boy" (1923), dedicated to Langston Hughes and published in Bookman. Frederick Asbury Cullen.Ĭullen, the only poet of the black renaissance to come of age in Harlem, attended DeWitt Clinton High School. No longer linked to living family members, Cullen's last name changed after he entered the family of Carolyn Belle Mitchell and the Reverend Dr. At her death in 1918, a friend implored her minister to take the orphaned youth. His mother transported him to Baltimore to the care of his paternal grandmother, who moved with him to Harlem in 1912. He and colleague Langston Hughes became the era's most sought-after, most published poets.Ĭullen was born under obscure circumstances on May 30, 1903, in Louisville, Kentucky. DuBois referred to as "two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body." In place of a prevalent heavy-handed social criticism, he integrated contemplation of négritude and white dominance with graceful phrasing, traditional British forms, and universal themes. He stood apart from his milieu in a split self that W. Vincent Millay, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He profited from readings in the works of John Keats, A. Countée Louis Porter Cullen, a metrical genius and star of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote less out of racial consciousness than for the joy of poetic music.
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