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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Identify why the author included the referenced detail at that point in the passage — its function, not its content.
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Answers that merely repeat or summarize the topic of the detail instead of describing the role it plays.
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Ask what job the detail does for the paragraph, then for the passage's broader point.
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