Cullen wins a citywide prize for “I Have a Rendezvous with Life”
Poet involved
What happened
While a student at DeWitt Clinton High School in Manhattan, New York, seventeen-year-old Countee Cullen won a citywide poetry contest sponsored by the Empire Federation of Women’s Clubs. His poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” written as a reply to Alan Seeger’s wartime lyric “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” was reprinted in New York newspapers and soon appeared in magazines and anthologies. The prize marked his first public reputation beyond the school paper and the Magpie.
Literary impact
The contest made Cullen a prodigy in print before he left secondary school and set the pattern of public expectation that would follow him through Color. The poem’s optimistic, nonracial lyricism also previewed the formal, Keatsian manner he later defended against jazz experiment.
Source: Wikipedia
