by CHARLES MOLESWORTH
US poet/author/scholar Countee Cullen (1903 – 1946) PHOTO/Wikipedia
or several decades many readers of modern American poetry have believed that Countee Cullen was a lesser poet than Langston Hughes. This judgment is rather sharply at odds with how the two poets stood relative to each other during the Harlem Renaissance. Large numbers of readers in that period — from the elite to the newly enlarging community of “common readers” in the African American population — admired both men. Hughes himself described his status as that of the “poet low rate,” punning on the unofficial title of “poet laureate” which he gladly ceded to Cullen. The joke at once mocked the notion of laurels, and yet demonstrated that such categories had their social and literary critical function. But despite all the distortions (more of which in a moment) involved in assessing laurels and their correct bestowal, we can learn something about African American poetry and its merits and context by rehearsing the difference as well as the affinities, elective and natural, between the two men.
It is important to remember that Hughes and Cullen were for a while very close friends. They introduced one another to important critics, such as Alain Locke, and they shared a great many enthusiasms — most importantly, perhaps, a love of the dramatic arts. They also faced economic stringencies which affected their relationship to their own talents. Both tried their hands at various genres — children’s books, playwriting, and fiction, a few essays — hoping against hope to make something like a living wage. Even when the terms of their friendship were less close, they collaborated on socially conscious projects; this was most evident (though now largely forgotten) when Hughes solicited a poem from Cullen to help support the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners; Hughes, for his part, helped in some of the rewriting of St. Louis Woman, the musical that held Cullen’s attention for a protracted period, as he contemplated a financial success. (Admittedly, Cullen was wary about Hughes’s gaining more than his just share of any possible royalties. This wariness perhaps resulted from the authorship dispute Hughes engaged in with Zora Neale Hurston over the musical Mulebone.) Both men also knew — and self-consciously accepted — the task of writing poetry when large portions of the country’s social and political sympathies were not available to them.
Of course, Cullen’s temperament differed from Hughes’s in many ways. Perhaps most important as a shaping force was the interest he explored and committed himself to in his life as a student. From the rigorous DeWitt Clinton high school in Manhattan to his year as a master’s degree student at Harvard, he enjoyed exposure to a wider range of poetic instruction than Hughes had been able to enjoy. Cullen’s temperament thrived on instruction: he liked setting models and formats in front of himself as a way to measure and reaffirm his talent. Cullen was the more developed of the two in terms of possessing an articulated esthetic that he could apply to most any possible verse form that came to hand. In May 1924, he responded, with his typical kindness and balanced assessment, to one of Hughes’s poems.
As you must realize, I was very anxious to receive both your letters and the card you sent me — and especially the poem which I consider, while not the best you have written especially good, and most naturally adapted to music. You have a pronounced gift of singing and painting in your work. I would really give anything to possess your sense of color. I am going to send the poem out immediately. I am also going to send you copies of Opportunity and the Messenger in which poems of yours appeared.
This letter was sent while Hughes was journeying around the seven seas and Cullen was working as an assistant editor at Opportunity and writing a column called “The Dark Tower”: his personal commentary on things cultural and literary taking place largely in Harlem. The tone falls between that of envy and brotherhood.
Signs and tokens of friendship sometimes avail, but little. Unless writers have actively collaborated on a major project or over a length of time, the ability to focus on competitive opposition (or jealousy or egregious temperamental differences) lends itself to a more dramatic historical narrative. In the case of Hughes and Cullen, a starkly polarized context was structured by considering their respective attitudes towards poetry in general and poetry for the African American audience in particular. The literary historical facts have generally been marshaled to depict Hughes as a breaker of poetic forms and Cullen as overly beholden to them. As an exemplar of modernism and its many ways of “making it new,” Hughes’s reputation has grown greatly while Cullen’s has become somewhat static and even diminished when compared to what it was in the 1920s and ‘30s. What continues to serve as a crucial contrast in the matter of Hughes and Cullen had become visible in the terms we see today because of the vast developments in African American literature. These developments have shown considerable bias in the direction of Hughes as opposed to Cullen. But some historical reconsideration might illumine Cullen’s worth and his continued meriting of canonical status.
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