Cullen publishes The Ballad of the Brown Girl
Poet involved
What happened
Harper brought out Countee Cullen’s The Ballad of the Brown Girl in New York in 1928, the same crowded season as his Guggenheim award and his wedding. The long narrative, already praised while he was an undergraduate, recast a traditional ballad of rival loves in Cullen’s formal English measures. It stood beside Copper Sun as proof that he meant to work inside inherited European forms rather than jazz or dialect.
Literary impact
The book extended Cullen’s claim on the ballad and on rime royal, forms he had studied as craft rather than as folk salvage. Critics who wanted a more vernacular Renaissance often treated the volume as further evidence of his conservatism.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
