Countee+Cullen

block 3 ANM

Poet, novelist, childrens writer, and playwright, Countee Cullen is something of a mysterious figure. He was born 30 March 1903, and it had been difficult for scholars to place exactly when he was born. New York City and Baltimore have been given as his birthplace, but he claimed that his birth places was in New York City, which he claim for the rest of hes life. Sometime before 1918, Cullen was adopted by Frederick A. and, Carolyn Belle Cullen. Cullen went by the name of Countee Porter until 1918 by 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen. Cullens adopted father was a pioneer black minister and he and, Cullen were vary close. Cullen was a outstanding student, he worked with the schools newspaper, and was assisted in editing the literary magazine "Magpie", and then began to write poetry. At New York University he worte most of his poems his first three volumes: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). Cullen was the first to get a extensive eduration and with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet. Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writers of the 1920s. He was also in the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance: On 9 April 1928 he married Yolande Du Bois, only child of W.E.B Du Bois, in one the most grand weddings in black New York History, but their marriage didnt last they divorced in 1930, that affected Cullen. From 1930s until his death he wrote a great deal less do to his job as a french teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High. Cullen died do to high blood pressure and urimic poisoning. For Cullens creative genius and his devotion of teachings were commemorated by his name being given to a school in Harlem and to the Harlem Branch of the New York public library.

Yet Do I Marvel Pome **I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, ** **And did He stoop to quibble could tell why ** **The little buried mole continues blind, ** **Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die, ** **Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus ** **Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare ** **If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus ** **To struggle up a never-ending stair. ** **Inscrutable His ways are, and immune ** **To catechism by a mind too strewn ** **With petty cares to slightly understand ** **What awful brains compels His awful hand. ** **Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: ** **To make a poet black, and bid him sing! ** ('Yet Do I Marvel')

=__Citations__= N/n. Countee Porter Cullen. Dictionary of American Biography. Published 15 Feb 2011.

N/n. The Harlem Literary Renaissance. New York. Publisher, Harper and Brothers. Print.

American National Biography. Feb.2000. Published by Oxford University.