THE POETRY OF COUNTEE P. CULLEN Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Shucard, Alan, 1935- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 22:52:37 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/287620 71-11,458 SHUCARD, Alan Robert, 1935- THE POETRY OF COUNTEE P. CULLEN. The University o£ Arizona, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © 1971 Alan Robert Shucard ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE POETRY OF COUNTEE P. CULLEN by Alan Robert Shucard A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1971 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Alan Rnhp-p* Shuonrd entitled The Poetry of Countee P. Cullan be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2 & A -/ lo Dissertation Director Date After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the follov/ing members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:*" /An ^0~JI % (t> /a 7y O (f // "This approval and acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the bibliographical assistance of the librarians at the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History, of the New York Public Library; the indispensable suggestions of my supervisor, Dr. Cecil Robinson, of the Department of English, University of Arizona; and, above all, the help with manuscript and spirit of my wife, Maureen. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE DOMINANT RACIAL THEME IN CULLEN'S POETRY ... 5 III. UNIVERSAL THEMES IN CULLEN'S POETRY 39 IV. AN EVALUATION OF CULLEN'S POETRY 89 BIBLIOGRAPHY 133 V ABSTRACT In the biographical sketch Countee P. Cullen wrote of himself for the Caroling Dusk anthology of 1927, he said, "He has said with a reiteration sickening to some of his friends, that he wishes any merit that may be in his work to flow from it solely as the expression of a poet—with no racial consideration to bolster it up." Yet racial consideration pervades his poetry; inescapably the feeling emerges from the reading of reviews of his work that critics were aware of dealing with the novelty of a black poet. He assumes virtually all the stances of protest, and yearns for death when he despairs of the effectiveness of protest. He uses Keats as his primary model because he feels a kinship with Keats in various ways; but, also, it would hardly do for a Negro poet seeking acceptance in the Twenties to model himself after such avant-garde poets as Pound, and the Imagists, and Eliot. A natural outgrowth of Cullen's sense of race is his notion of art and the place of race-consciousness in art, particularly in poetry. He develops this theme in columns he wrote for Crisis and other organs in the middle to late Twenties, as well as in his poetry. The Christian element in Cullen's poetry is extremely interesting to examine, for his early ambivalence toward "white" Christianity and African paganism, gradually changing to acceptance of Christian faith, parallels the change in his racial feeling from vi vii earlier protest to later quiet desperation. There is a concomitant alteration in the direction of his literary production from poetry toward children's literature as he seemed to feel that his poetic art was not the effective weapon he had hoped it would be to achieve racial equality. There is another important motif in Cullen, his courtship of death, which is manifest not only in poems that deal specifically with death, but often in his love poems, too. Death and love frequently seem inextricably entangled for Cullen as man and poet. Out of regard for Cullen's poetry as that of'a sensitive black man who has won literary prizes as representative of his race, there evolved the idea that even if it contains some flaws, it must be good and lasting. Literary analysis, however, reveals several poetic sins that Cullen commits habitually, some of which are damaging enough to lead to the conclusion that he is, in fact, not a first- rate poet, however interesting he may be as a spokesman for Negroes. Cullen remains, for all his crying out for freedom, a slave to traditional form, often too obviously manipulating words and lines for the sake of regularity of rhyme and meter; he has a penchant for cliche and the use of pretty, anachronistic poeticisms. His characters in narrative poems (e.g., Jim in "The Black Christ") suffer from a clear lack of consistency. Though he has been more than once compared with Keats in his sense of death's treading close upon the heels of happiness, he is far less subtle than Keats in treating so delicate a matter. He is again comparable to Keats in his attempt at rich, aesthetic description, but Cullen too frequently viii appears bathetic. He sometimes fails to know when to end a poem or how to sustain a high level of quality through any of his poems of considerable length—or even through many of his shorter pieces. Yet there is often strength in the cleanliness of Cullen's lines, and to know his work is to sense pressures his country forced upon him as a black man, and the literary debility America herself has suffered for applying those pressures. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Since the adulation and predictions of a deathless future that the poetry of Countee P. Cullen (1903-1946) aroused in the 1920's and '30's, the poetry has declined into relative obscurity. Then and since, there has been a tendency on the part of commentators on his verse to praise it, and sometimes to attack it, on the basis of its being "Negro poetry"—or, conversely, on the basis of its being insufficiently "Negro"; in either case, it has been evaluated largely on non-literary grounds. The present dissertation will clarify the nature of Cullen*s poetry, insofar as is possible, in literary terms. To achieve these ends is no simple matter, for Cullen himself is ambivalent about his intent, and seems often to vacillate between playing the pure aesthete and the racial spokesman. The study will in no sense be a sociological tract, but because many of his poems and critical attitudes derive from his sense of race, an operating definition of "Negro poetry" must first be established, whence it can be shown that Cullen, despite his own frequent denials, writes a great deal of poetry of this category. Not only will the dissertation examine his treatment of the racial theme in his verse and in prose pronouncements, but also his handling of other themes, such as 1 2 religion, death, the nature of poetry, and love, primarily as they relate to his race-consciousness. Further, the study will examine Cullen's poetic technique, one that is extremely traditional, consciously derivative of Keats, in a time when the tremor of the Imagist movement is being registered among English-language poets everywhere; reasons will be postulated for his notable conservatism. Finally, taking account of other evaluations of his poetry, too many of which have been tainted by racial considerations, the present study will arrive at an assessment of Cullen's worth as a poet based on a close reading of the body of his work, and not, for good or ill, on his color. Cullen's poetry does not permit the critic to forget his Negroness, but the final judgment of him as a poet must be made from his poetry alone. This goal is made difficult to achieve by the fact that Cullen is associated with the "Harlem Renaissance," sometimes referred to as the "Negro Renaissance," which are terms used to describe the outpouring of literary work by black authors, centered chiefly in Harlem, in the Twenties. It coincided with a keen white reading audience for novels, short stories, essays and poems describing colored life. The kind of life the white readers anticipated was generally that involving the seediest aspects of ghetto life or the kind of primitivism that reverberated through the poems of Cullen that reach out to an idealized African heritage, although he avoids pandering to the lowest elements in white taste. Edward Margolies characterizes the phenomenon (it scarcely had the coherence 3 of a "movement") as follows: The Harlem Renaissance was a swing to romanticism—sometimes dangerously racist, sometimes curiously exotic, but always self-congratulatory. The trouble is, of course, that roman­ ticism by itself projects a cruelly distorted image of the Negro experience.