Countee Cullen (Countee Leroy Porter, 1903–1946) was one of the foremost poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement of African American writers, musicians, and artists centered in the Harlem section of New York City during the 1920s. Beginning with his university years, Cullen strove to establish himself as an author of romantic his university education and of his upbringing as the adopted son of a Methodist Episcopal reverend.
Some literary critics have praised Cullen’s skill at writing European-style verse, finding, for example, in “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” an artful use of diction and a rhythm and sonority that allow him to capture the atmosphere typical of the English ballad form of past centuries. Others have found Cullen’s use means of careful attention to his chosen craft, his work could not help but do so.
Explicit references to racial matters do in fact decline in Cullen’s later work, but not because he felt any less passionately about these matters. Rather, Cullen increasingly focused on the religious dimension of his poetry. In “The Black Christ,” in which the poet imagines the death and resurrection of a rural African a strong sense of race consciousness” that “grows upon me, I find, as I grow older.”
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