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COUNTEE CULLEN Countee Lero y Porte r Culle n wa s born o n 3 0 May 1903 , th e unprove n claimants to place being Louisville, Baltimore, and New York City (the first seems the likeliest). W e do not know who his natural parents were, but he was adopted as a teenager by a New York minister. H e attended the mostly white D e Wit t Clinto n High School, where he was editor-in-chief o f th e school pape r and associate editor of it s literary magazine. H e took firs t prize in an oratorical competition, was vice-president of his senior class, and won election to the honor society with a 92-percent average. H e had started writing poetry in grade school, and at 17 copped a first prize and national fame by penning "Life's Rendezvous" to counter the famous poem"I Have a Rendezvous With Death" by Alan Seeger (Harvard '10). Entering Ne w Yor k Universit y i n 1922 , Culle n majore d i n Englis h literature, doing most of his work with Hyder Rollins, who held a Harvard Ph.D. and would accept a Harvard professorship i n 1926. H e minored in French, and also studied Latin, Greek, and German. Strongl y influenced by Keats, and by the recent Pulitzer Prize winners Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edn a St . Vincen t Milla y (sh e wa s th e subjec t o f hi s senio r honor s thesis), he won a host of national prizes, including the Witter Bynner Poetry Contest named for a poet from the Harvard class of 1902."Th e Ballad of the Brown Girl " (1923) elicite d fro m Harvard' s balladry scholar, Georg e Lyman Kittredge, the verdict that it was"an unusually successful example of poetical composition in the style of the popular ballad.'" "Th e Shroud of Color" (first published in the AmericanMercury, 1924) made a strong impact in the literary world. After his 192 5 graduation with a Phi Beta Kappa key (he was one of nine so honored out of a class of 102) , Cullen spent the next year earning an AM . degre e a t Harvard, where h e particularl y value d hi s study with Robert S. Hillyer ('17), who would a few years later win the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Verse. His other professors included Kittredge and Irving Babbitt. Durin g his first term in Cambridge, Cullen's first volume of poems, Color, appeared an d garnere d wide acclai m (th e first of mor e tha n fift y reviews wa s i n th e Harvard Crimson, 21 Octobe r 1925) , alon g wit h th e Harmon Foundation Award. 242 Countie CuUen Aside from poetry and critical essays, he collaborated on some theatrical projects, including a Broadway musical. I n 1934 he prepared a new version of Euripides' Medea, with seven choruses set to music by Virgil Thomson (A.B. 1922 , Mus.D. 1982) , for the noted black actress Rose McClendon , whose illness aborted the production. Turnin g down black-college posts in the South, Cullen taught French and English at Frederick Douglass Junior High School i n Harlem for a dozen years until hypertension and uremic poisoning led to his death in Sydeman Hospital on 9 January 1946. Mor e than 3000 people attended his funeral i n the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. The Shroud of Colo r (For Llewellyn Ransom)* "Lord, being dark," I said,"I cannot bear The further touc h of earth, the scented air; Lord, being dark, forewilled t o that despair My color shrouds me in, I am as dirt Beneath my brother's heel; there is a hurt In all the simple joys which to a child Are sweet; they are contaminate, defile d By truths of wrongs the childish vision fails To see; too great a cost this birth entails. I strangle in this yoke drawn tighter than The worth of bearing it, just to be man. I am not brave enough to pay the price In full; I lack the strength to sacrifice. I who have burned my hands upon a star, And climbed high hills at dawn to view the far Illimitable wonderments of earth, For whom all cups have dripped the wine of mirth, For whom the sea has strained her honeyed throa t 'Scholars have so far not succeeded in identifying...

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