19 pages • 38 minutes read
For A Poet
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Background
Historical/Literary Context
The flowering of Countee Cullen’s poetry coincided with the high-water mark of the Harlem Renaissance, the first major movement to arise out of the African American arts community. The Harlem Renaissance was bolstered by the shifting dynamics of the New York neighborhood during the Great Migration of the 1920s, when African American laborers from the South moved northward in search of economic opportunities and wider cultural acceptance. More than 170,000 African Americans had settled in Harlem by 1920, and this led to a burgeoning community of artists and intellectuals who were tasked with finding their place in a contemporary African American milieu—including vital Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. By 1930, Harlem was the largest, densest Black metropolitan population in America and had fostered the first flowering of a Black urban consciousness in American history, one that was driven by both comfort and discontent.
Cullen was present at what is considered the beginning of the literary aspect of the Harlem Renaissance, a 1920 dinner at the Civic Club that celebrated African American writers. This afforded Cullen, and other intellectual leaders like W. E. B. DuBois, the chance to socialize with members of the white literary establishment, which in turn led to opportunities of publication for white readership. This wider audience, and seeming acceptance by the establishment, broadened the scope of the Harlem Renaissance and secured its place in literary history.
The urge to reclaim African arts was driven by Négritude, a French art movement that was one of the leading motifs of the Harlem Renaissance. Négritude artists focused on examining the ways in which their African heritage enabled them to manifest unique cultural productions that would then empower them politically and enable them to rebel against Europe’s colonial existence. While the notion of this shared African past, one that allowed its bearers a unique cultural production, was widespread throughout the Harlem Renaissance, it also reinforced a distinct difference between white audiences and Black artists. Because of this, Cullen professed mixed feelings about Négritude and its accompanying assumptions, which can be witnessed in his poems “Atlantic City Waiter” and most forcefully in “Heritage.”
Cullen came of age in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, growing up amidst the creative and intellectual bloom, under the guidance of a passionate and invested father-figure who undoubtedly encouraged his adopted son to actively partake in the flourishing intellectual scene. “For a Poet” depicts this widening awareness of acceptability within white circles, and the methods that must be undertaken to assure success. It speaks to the tensions that existed within Black poets of the time, who walked a tenuous balance between racial discrimination and the white acceptance that typically signified success. The poem’s focus on concealing of an aspect of a self that has been pained by acceptance and indifference—the “earth’s breath so keen and cold” (Line 6)—suggests the protection of an essential identity. Cullen’s recognition of this, amidst the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, is a solemn and grounding point of departure, though one that speaks to the realities faced by African American poets. “For a Poet” represents a poet on the brink of success, cautioning himself that some things must remain hidden, and is reflective of Cullen’s particular and somewhat conservative approach to poetry.
Authorial Context
Despite the overflow of African American culture and intellectual vigor that emerged during the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen occupied a position that drew from both the African American arts community and the dominant European tradition in which his formal education was steeped. Perhaps because of this, Cullen believed that poetry could serve as a vehicle between the races. He emerged onto the scene as a young poet full of promise, releasing an incandescent collection of poems, filled with the cultural milieu of Harlem in the 1920s. His approach, making use of traditional forms and meter, was widely lauded, though it represented a conservative approach to a vanguard art movement. Other poets, like Claude McKay, also used European forms, such as the sonnet, but more prominent poets like Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson introduced elements from Black culture, such as rhythms of jazz and the blues. Cullen spoke out against Hughes’s use of such elements, cautioning other poets that they risked alienating white readers, which was counter to his own artistic project of using poetry to establish a greater common ground between the races. More than anything, however, Cullen often professed his deep want to be read simply as a poet rather than as an African American poet.
In giving with his formal education, Cullen was immensely familiar with the English poetical traditions, and though he rejected the techniques of the Modernists, he was particularly fond of the Romantic movement. Part of the wider intellectual movement of Romanticism, the English Romantics flourished in the early 1800s under the auspices of luminary poets like Percy Bysshe Shelly and John Keats. Much of Cullen’s poetry actively maintains the traditions of Romanticism with their imaginative lyricism, and their focus on the personal subjective experience and the often melancholic place that leads. Cullen felt a close kinship with Keats especially, writing two poems to the young poet in Color. Cullen perfected his technical ability reading and emulating the skilled poets of the Romantic movement, but his use of their forms and purposely antiquated cadences belied his ultimately conservative and backwards-looking approach to poetry.
At first approach, “For a Poet” seems to be a monologue, that of a poet bidding goodbye to his dreams in recognition that they cannot be sustained on the “keen and cold” (Line 6) earth. In the 1928 second edition of Color, however, Cullen added a dedication to the poem—To John Gaston Edgar—which implies the poem might be read as a dialogue, the poet speaking to Edgar, or Edgar to Cullen. However, the poem’s placement in Color, as the initial poem in a series labelled ‘Epitaphs,’ suggests a speaking to or of one who is gone. John Gaston Edgar was a young poet who is commonly thought to have been Cullen’s boyfriend in the early 1920s, but very little is known of their relationship. “For a Poet” certainly indicates that whatever the two shared, it is now over, and a funereal tone hangs over the poem. Perhaps reflecting Cullen’s fitful place as a poet who is inescapably recognized as African American, “For a Poet” depicts a torn self, one that is aware that only the conventional, the not-hateful, the not-angry, will find acceptance, and that any other dreams, no matter how personal or intimate, must be repressed if one can continue.
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