Countée Louis Porter Cullen, a metrical genius and star of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote less out of racial consciousness than for the joy of poetic music. He profited from readings in the works of John Keats, A. E. Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He stood apart from his milieu in a split self that W. E. B. DuBois referred to as "two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body." In place of a prevalent heavy-handed social criticism, he integrated contemplation of négritude and white dominance with graceful phrasing, traditional British forms, and universal themes. He and colleague Langston Hughes became the era's most sought-after, most published poets.
Cullen was born under obscure circumstances on May 30, 1903, in Louisville, Kentucky. His mother transported him to Baltimore to the care of his paternal grandmother, who moved with him to Harlem in 1912. At her death in 1918, a friend implored her minister to take the orphaned youth. No longer linked to living family members, Cullen's last name changed after he entered the family of Carolyn Belle Mitchell and the Reverend Dr. Frederick Asbury Cullen.
Cullen, the only poet of the black renaissance to come of age in Harlem, attended DeWitt Clinton High School. His first submission to national journals was "To a Brown Boy" (1923), dedicated to Langston Hughes and published in Bookman. That same year, editor Jessie Redmon Fauset lauded his verse in Crisis, the NAACP magazine.
