Color
Countee Cullen · 1925
Read Color by Countee Cullen (1925) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/cullen-color-1925.txt.
Description
Countee Cullen published Color in 1925, his landmark first collection of poems, when he was twenty-two years old. The book weds Keatsian form to the Black experience, in the phrase its first reviewers made famous in Harlem. Its centerpiece, Heritage, asks what Africa means to one, three centuries removed by force and time.
Cullen writes sonnets, ballads, and epitaphs in strict forms learned from Keats, Shelley, and the English tradition. Yet the matter is lynching, passing, faith, and the ache of color in a land that promised freedom to all. Incident, on a Baltimore train, turns a child's smile into a lifelong memory of a racial slur. Simon the Cyrenian and Yet Do I Marvel weigh God and the Black poet's strange, appointed song in America. The book made Cullen, with McKay and Hughes, a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Countee Cullen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 1925 |
| COLLECTION | BOOKS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 48.4 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | Public Domain |
| RIGHTS | PUBLIC DOMAIN |
| SOURCE | Project Gutenberg |