Cullen edits the anthology Caroling Dusk
Poet involved
What happened
In New York in 1927 Countee Cullen compiled and published Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, gathering work from Paul Laurence Dunbar through younger voices such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Helene Johnson. In the foreword he insisted the book was verse by Negro poets, not a separate school of “Negro verse,” and argued that writers who inherited English had more to learn from English and American poetry than from “nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance.”
Literary impact
The anthology is Cullen’s major critical statement as well as an editorial monument of the Renaissance. Its preface remains the clearest prose account of his universalist, formalist programme and of his resistance to dialect and racial special pleading.
Source: Wikipedia
