Ee Cullen example essay topic

Poet, anthologist, novelist, translator, children's writer, and playwright, Count " ee Cullen wore many different hats. More than any other black writer of his generation, he was praised as a major crossover literary figure. While he was not the first black man to write "white" verse-ballads, quatrains, and such (Phyllis Wheatley and Paul Lawrence Dunbar came before him), he was the one who was most celebrated while doing so. If any one event started the Harlem Renaissance, it was when Count " ee Cullen emerged as a successful writer at a young age. He was born Count " ee Leroy Porter on May 30, 1903. Where he was born remains a mystery-some said that he was born in Louisville, KY; others reported that he was born in New York City; still others placed him in Baltimore, MD.

He was raised by his grandmother until she died when he was 15, then unofficially adopted by the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, NY. While still in high school, he won a poetry contest, was a leader in many activities such as editor of his school literary magazine, and received numerous honors in many subjects upon graduation. Cullen went on to New York University, where he got either first or second prize in more contests, and published his first volume of verse, entitled Color, which was both critically and commercially successful, and contains some of his most famous poetry, such as "Incident": Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee; I saw a Baltimore an Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, "Nigger". I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That's all that I remember. After he went on to receive his Master of Arts Degree from Harvard, Cullen published Copper Sun, Ballad of the Brown Girl, and Caroling Dusk (a collection of poems by black poets).

In 1928, Cullen married Nina Yolanda DuBois, daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, after a five-year courtship. It was an idealized union-the popular young poet, son of a successful minister, and the daughter of one of the most famous African-Americans in the world. It did not last, however. The couple divorced in France in 1930, during their stay there for Mr. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship. The reason behind the failure of the marriage was never stated. Upon his return from France, Cullen concentrated on teaching English and French at Frederick Douglass Junior High, in New York City, which he continued to do for the rest of his life.

During that time, he wrote One Way to Heaven, The Medea and Some Poems, The Lost Zoo, My Lives and How I Lost Them, "The Third Fourth of July; a one-act play", with Owen Dodson, and St. Louis Woman, with Area Bon temps. In 1940, he married Ida Mae Roberson, whom he had known for ten years and courted for two. Ida Mae was devoted to him in life and, after his death, dedicated to collecting material about Cullen and other African-American Writers. Count " ee Cullen died suddenly of uremic poisoning in 1946. On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Count " ee Cullen, his last book of poetry, was published posthumously in 1947.

The poet, however, did choose the poems to be included, and considered them to be his best work. My Soul's High Song, published in 1991 and edited by Gerald Early, is a collection of all the poems in On These I Stand except the excerpts from The Lost Zoo. Early added Cullen's translation of the Greek mythological play, Medea (which Cullen probably omitted from On These I Stand because he wanted the anthology to be all-poetry), along with a few additional poems from almost all of the rest of Cullen's books. The additions were made because Early either felt "that the poems were good or that they helped to more fully elucidate Cullen's art".

Early also added a section of prose writing, including an essay by Cullen about his experiences as a creative writing teacher. That Early chose to include things such as the creative writing essay and an early version of the poem "Judi as Iscariot" as well as the version originally published in Color shows that the editor was interested in showcasing the process of writing as well as the finished product. Whatever lesson Early was trying to teach by doing so, however, might have been better expressed if he had put the original and finished products in the book one right after the other, rather than leaving the reader to flip back and forth through the thick anthology. Cullen wanted to be known as simply a poet, not a "Negro poet". Though he didn't completely ignore racial themes, he went to school with mostly white people and wanted poetry to cross over racial boundaries. He criticized other black poets such as Langston Hughes for using jazz rhythms and / or dialects in their poetry.

In one of his most famous poems, "Yet Do I Marvel", Cullen wrote: "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" He wrote in the style of 19th century Romantic poets, especially John Keats, (for whom he wrote "For John Keats, Apostle of Beauty", ) by using meter, rhyme scheme, and the sonnet form. He even alludes to Greek mythology and the Bible in some of his works. Though Cullen's reputation was overshadowed by those of other Harlem Renaissance writers, his career embodied the Renaissance more fully, because Cullen showed that his work could fit into the mainstream of American literature while still retaining a racial consciousness..