Countee Cullen

From Philosopedia

Cullen, Countee (30 May 1903 - 9 January 1946)

Countee LeRoy Porter, who was abandoned at birth in Louisville, Kentucky, was raised by Mrs. Porter, his grandmother. When Mrs. Porter died in 1918, Cullen was adopted by Frederick Ashbury Cullen, minister at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, and was raised a Methodist.

He attended Townsend Harris High School in Queens, New York City, and in 1922 received honors in Latin studies at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, New York City.

Cullen attended New York University, graduating in 1925. He then pursued graduate studies at Harvard University.

In 1928, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history, he married Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois. Two years later, according to Gerard Early, he told his wife of his attraction to men and they were divorced.

Cullen, the African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote an epic poem about lynching, “The Black Christ” (1929). The 900-line piece exemplified Cullen’s brilliant poetic layering of racial and gay themes. Alden Reimonenq, of St. Mary’s College of California, has noted that Jim, its main character, can be viewed “not only as the persecuted black who is falsely accused of rape, but also as the victim of heterosexism.” Jim is associated with Lycidas, Patroclus, and Jonathan, “all characters who have had long-standing associations with gay readings of their respective texts,” leading Reimonenq to declare that Cullen’s poetry “in the context of the gay closet in which it was written is the cornerstone on which to rebuild Cullen’s reputation as a gay poet laureate and as the inaugurator of a black gay male poetic tradition.”

Although married early in life to W. E. B. DuBois’s daughter Yolande and to Ida Robertson only six years before his death, Cullen had “a steady string of male lovers in the United States and France.”

Cullen, who died of uremic poisoning and complications from high blood pressure, is buried in the Bronx's Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City.

Works

Color (1925, poetry)

Copper Sun (1927, poetry)

The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928, poetry)

The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929, poetry)

One Way to Heaven (1932, novel)

The Medea and Some Poems (1935, poetry)

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