Cullen takes a master’s degree at Harvard
Poet involved
What happened
After publishing Color and taking his B.A. at New York University, Countee Cullen entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for graduate work in English. He studied ballads with George Lyman Kittredge, the romantic movement with Irving Babbitt, and poetry with Robert Hillyer, and received the M.A. in 1926. Letters from Cambridge to Harlem friends record both pride and the strain of being a celebrated young poet in a traditional English department.
Literary impact
Harvard confirmed the conservative craft Cullen already loved: measured lines, rhyme, and the English lyric inheritance. The training under Kittredge and Babbitt strengthened his later argument, in the Caroling Dusk foreword, that Black American poets had more to gain from English and American verse than from a reconstructed African tradition.
Source: Wikipedia
