Excerpts From Countee Cullen

’s Forward To Caroling Dusk Essay, Research Paper

Countee Cullen

It is now five years since James Weldon Johnson edited with a

brilliant essay on "The Negro’s Creative Genius" The Book of American Negro

Poetry, four years since the publication of Robert T. Kerlin’s Negro Poets and

Their Poems, and three years since from the Trinity College Press in Durham, North

Carolina, came An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, edited by Newman Ivey

White and Walter Clinton Jackson.

[. . . .]

[T]here would be scant reason for the assembling and publication of another such

collection were it not for the new voices that within the past three to five years have

sung so significantly as to make imperative an anthology recording some snatches of their

songs. To those intelligently familiar with what is popularly termed the renaissance in

art and literature by Negroes, it will not be taken as a sentimentally risky observation

to contend that the recent yearly contests conducted by Negro magazines, such as Opportunity

and The Crisis, as well as a growing tendency on the part of white editors to give

impartial consideration to the work of Negro writers, have awakened to a happy

articulation many young Negro poets who had thitherto lisped only in isolated places in

solitary numbers. It is primarily to give them a concerted bearing that this collection

has been published. For most of these poets the publication of individual volumes of their

poems is not an immediate issue. However, many of their poems during these four or five

years of accentuated interest in the artistic development of the race have become familiar

to a large and ever-widening circle of readers who, we feel, will welcome a volume

marshaling what would otherwise remain for some time a miscellany of deeply appreciated

but scattered verse.

The place of poetry in the cultural development of a race or people has always been one

of importance; indeed, poets are prone, with many good reasons for their conceit, to hold

their art the most important. Thus while essentially wishing to draw the public ear to the

work of the younger Negro poets, there have been included with their poems those of modern

Negro poets already established and acknowledged, by virtue of their seniority and

published books, as worthy practitioners of their art. There were Negro poets before Paul

Laurence Dunbar, but his uniquity as the first Negro to attain to and maintain a

distinguished place among American poets, a place fairly merited by the most acceptable

standards of criticism, makes him the pivotal poet of this volume.

I have called this collection an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than an

anthology of Negro verse, since this latter designation would be more confusing than

accurate. Negro poetry, it seems to me, in the sense that we speak of Russian, French, or

Chinese poetry, must emanate from some country other than this in some language other than

our own. Moreover, the attempt to corral the outbursts of the ebony muse into some

definite mold to which all poetry by Negroes will conform seems altogether futile and

aside from the facts. This country’s Negro writers may here and there turn some singular

facet toward the literary sun, but in the main, since theirs is also the heritage of the

English language, their work will not present any serious aberration from the poetic

tendencies of their times. The conservatives, the middlers, and the arch heretics will be

found among them as among the white poets; and to say that the pulse beat of their verse

shows generally such a fever, or the symptoms of such an ague, will prove on closer

examination merely the moment’s exaggeration of a physician anxious to establish a new

literary ailment. As heretical as it may sound, there is the probability that Negro poets,

dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich

background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings

toward an African inheritance. Some of the poets herein represented will eventually find

inclusion in any discriminatingly ordered anthology of American verse, and there will be

no reason for giving such selections the needless distinction of a separate section marked

Negro verse.

While I do not feel that the work of these writers conforms to anything that can be

called the Negro school of poetry, neither do I feel that their work is varied to the

point of being sensational; rather is theirs a variety within a uniformity that is trying

to maintain the higher traditions of English verse. I trust the selections here presented

bear out this contention. The poet writes out of his experience, whether it be personal or

vicarious, and as these experiences differ among other poets, so do they differ among

Negro poets; for the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified

as

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