Remarks by Countee Cullen | V2Melody Quotations

“But I suppose some of us erotic lads, vide myself, were placed here just to eat our hearts out with longing for unattainable things, especially for that friendship beyond understanding.”

A private admission of hunger for a love he could not safely name in public · Letter to Alain Locke, 3 March 1923

“It opened up for me Soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural.”

On reading Carpenter's Ioläus and finding honour in a love the world called shameful · Letter to Alain Locke, 3 March 1923

“My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.”

Treats verse as the outlet for an inner music rather than a public programme · Collected prose, My Soul's High Song

“There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call the breaks. In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things—read and write—and wait.”

Reduces a literary career to labour, luck, and the patience to keep at both · Advice to writers, as commonly attributed in collected writings

“For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.”

Urges the young to become lift rather than dead weight in the common work · Speech to the League of Youth, printed in The Crisis, August 1923

“The word realism generally has a distasteful connotation.”

A compact statement of his preference for lyric finish over raw report · Self-description / critical prose, as commonly cited

“Let art portray things as they are, no matter what the consequences, no matter who is hurt, is a blind bit of philosophy.”

Rejects unfiltered realism when it only arms hostility or cheapens the subject · The Dark Tower column, Opportunity

“Whether they relish the situation or not, Negroes should be concerned with making good impressions. They cannot do this by throwing wide every door of the racial entourage, to the wholesale gaze of the world at large. Decency demands that some things be kept secret; diplomacy demands it.”

Argues for privacy and tact as part of racial self-presentation in art · The Dark Tower column, Opportunity

“They tend to hurl this poet into the gaping pit that lies before all Negro writers, in the confines of which they become racial artists instead of artists pure and simple.”

Warns that a solely racial pose can trap a writer short of the universal · Review of Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues, The Dark Tower, 1926

“Never having been one to think all subjects and forms proper for poetic consideration, I regard these jazz poems as interlopers in the company of the truly beautiful poems in other sections of the book.”

Draws a hard line between jazz experiment and what he counted as lyric beauty · Review of Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues, The Dark Tower, 1926

“Good poetry is a lofty thought beautifully expressed. Poetry should not be too intellectual. It should deal more, I think, with the emotions. The highest type of poem is that which warmly stirs the emotions, which awakens a responsive chord in the human heart.”

Defines poetry as shared feeling rather than display of intellect · Remark, 1928

“There may have been many things in my life that have hurt me, and I find that the surest relief from these hurts is in writing.”

Treats composition as a practical remedy for private and public wounds · Remark, 1926, as quoted by Stephen H. Bronz

“In spite of myself I find that I am actuated by a strong sense of race consciousness. This grows upon me, I find, as I grow older, and although I struggle against it, it colors my writing, I fear, in spite of everything I can do.”

Admits that race consciousness returns even when he tries to write past it · Remark, 1926, as quoted by Stephen H. Bronz

“Most things I write I do for the sheer love of the music in them. Somehow or other, however, I find my poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys and his sorrows—mostly of the latter—and of the heights and the depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro.”

Music comes first, yet race keeps entering the poems of its own accord · Interview, Chicago Bee, 1927

“As a poet he is a rank conservative, loving the measured line and the skillful rhyme.”

Openly claims metre and rhyme against the experimental fashions of his decade · Self-description, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“Countée Cullen's chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination. His life so far has not convinced him that the problem is insoluble.”

A wry self-portrait of faith set against appetite and classical feeling · Third-person biographical note, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“I was reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage.”

His own brief account of the church household that shaped his manners and conflicts · Biographical note, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“If dialect is missed in this collection, it is enough to state that the day of dialect as far as Negro poets are concerned is in the decline.”

Treats literary dialect as a fading, often artificial medium rather than a required racial stamp · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue.”

Personality, not colour, is what finally sorts one poet from another · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“The poet writes out of his experience, whether it be personal or vicarious, and as these experiences differ among other poets, so do they differ among Negro poets; for the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe.”

Insists that double identity does not flatten every Black poet into one voice · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“In the main, since theirs is also the heritage of the English language, their work will not present any serious aberration from the poetic tendencies of their times.”

Places Black American poets inside the same formal weather as their contemporaries · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“As heretical as it may sound, there is the probability that Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance.”

Prefers the inherited English lyric tradition over a reconstructed African poetic past · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“Negro poetry, it seems to me, in the sense that we speak of Russian, French, or Chinese poetry, must emanate from some country other than this in some language other than our own.”

Argues that American English, not a separate racial tongue, is the medium of Black American verse · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

“I have called this collection an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than an anthology of Negro verse, since this latter designation would be more confusing than accurate.”

Refuses the idea that Black writers automatically constitute a separate poetic language or school · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

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