Countee Cullen's Contributions To The Harlem Renaissance

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Nesly Lubin English 4 Period B 9-17-12 Harlem Renaissance/Countee Cullen The Harlem Renaissance refers to the African-American boom of cultural expression that peaked in the 1920s. Harlem, in New York City, was at the center of this era, which was first called the New Negro Movement. It was a celebration of African-American heritage expressed through an outpouring of art, literature, music and dance. Intellectuals and the expansion of urban cultures helped the Harlem Renaissance along. Artistic expression and articulated appreciation of African-American culture helped to get white Americans to take notice of the talents of black Americans for the first time. The era succeeded in destroying some racist stereotypes through…show more content…
The lyrics challenged the traditions of poetry with their sensuous nature. Critics hailed the book, and Cullen's success helped to promote the work of his fellow African-American writers. Cullen also contributed to the Harlem Renaissance a sense of poetry as a tradition. That is, although his topics were often controversial, he wrote many of his poems in the form of the Shakespearean sonnet, and critics often discuss the influence of English Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth and William Blake on his…show more content…
B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger Negroes who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. It was an apt meshing of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly (they divorced in 1930) probably adversely affected Cullen, who remarried in 1940. In 1929, Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems to less than his accustomed glowing reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that The Black Christ, his longest and in many respects most complicated poem, was considered by most critics and reviewers to be his weakest and least distinguished.
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