Countee Cullen was a poet who received mixed reactions and who, because of his private life, has left jumbled facts concerning his life. Cullen was born as Countee Porter in 1903 to Elizabeth Thomas and a father whose name is unknown. He was born in Louisville, KY, Baltimore, MD, or perhaps New York. Both of his parents left him as a child and he was raised by a woman who was perhaps his paternal grandmother, Amanda Porter, until he was fifteen. At this point he was unofficially adopted by a Methodist minister, Reverend F.A. Cullen, and his family. Cullen later changed his last name to match his adopted family’s.Cullen began his writing during grade school but was not published until high school.
While in attendance at Dewitt Clinton High School he won a city-wide poetry contest for his poem, “I Have a Rendezvous with Life.” He also was very involved in extra-curriculars including being a class officer, editing the school magazine Magpie, and was the editor of the Clinton News.After his graduation, Cullen attended New York University attaining the honor of Phi Beta Kappa. During college, he received the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize and was the poetry editor of the school magazine, The Arch. When Cullen graduated in 1923 by one source, or 1925 by all others, he was also publishing his first collection of poems. Color contains poems about race relations and was very well received by readers.
In 1927, Cullen published his second collection of poetry, Copper Sun which did not discuss race as much as Color had. This work was well received, except for on those issues of race and it dealt instead with life and love. This is where he began to show that he wanted to be known and received as a poet, not a Black poet. This also stems from his experience in mainly white settings and his perceived inability to comment on Black life. The poems in Copper Sun were written while Cullen was attending Harvard University to attain his M.A., which he received in 1926. During this time he also worked as an assistant editor for Opportunity magazine.Cullen later traveled to France and Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 and married the daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, Yolande, in the same year. From this time abroad came the book, The Black Christ and Other Poems published in 1929. This collection received much criticism for his use of religious imagery and the value of his poems, which did not seem to stand up to the great promise exemplified in Color and Copper Sun.
After The Black Christ and Other Poems, Cullen’s career took a dramatic turn. His works were not as acclaimed as they once had been even though he continued to write. He published a novel, One Way to Heaven in 1932, Medea and Some Poems in 1935, and The Lost Zoo in 1940, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, a biography of Cullen’s cat. This strange turn to children’s literature (The Lost Zoo and My Lives…) may be due to his new-found teaching career in 1934 at Frederick Douglass Junior High School where he taught until his death. In 1940 he married again, this time to Ida Mae Roberson and remained married to her for the rest of his life. In this time he also worked to collect his favorite poems in On These I Stand (1947) and a play titled The Third Fourth of July which was only performed after his death. Cullen died on January 9, 1946 of uremic poisoning.
Biographical Information