Countee Cullen in Central Park, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, June 20, 1941
A fast starter and an early finisher: Like many another Wunderkind, Countee Cullen demonstrates how short is the shelf-life of precocity. His poetry first won acclaim while he was in high school; his first book was published upon his graduation from college. From the age of seventeen, Cullen was showered with prizes, culminating with a Guggenheim fellowship when he was twenty-five. “From the beginning Cullen was a poet with a public reputation—a kind of prodigy, whose works were noticed and held up for praise,” Major Jackson writes in an introduction to the Library of America’s handsome edition of Cullen’s collected poems.1
Remarkably, the recipient of this run of good fortune was black. Cullen’s career coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, that eccentric phenomenon of the Roaring Twenties resulting from an odd conjunction of social forces: a fascination with black culture by white bohemians and a calculation by officials at the principal civil rights organizations, the NAACPand the National Urban League, that the display of artistic accomplishment would elevate the standing of the race. These motives were in frequent conflict. White America thrilled to the putative atavism of jazzy “voodoo music” in Harlem cabarets (“You go sort of primitive up there,” the entertainer Jimmy Durante commented) and sought spiritual renewal from the psychic shock of World War I in a celebration of the “exotic” (“One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul, the
