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Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and Racial

Countée Cullen's poetry was the first flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, but his later career was dogged by bad luck and trouble.

Countée Cullen was 21 years old when he sent a manuscript of poems to the older writer Witter Bynner in 1924. The verse was precocious, heavily influenced by English poets of earlier centuries, but touched here and there by his experience of life in Harlem. "It seems to me that most of my poems can be grouped under one of two heads," Cullen wrote in a covering note, "the purely racial, and the purely lyrical." The poems were published the following year, and "Color" has come to be recognized as an early stirring in the Harlem Renaissance—the first flowering of African-American art,...

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