“There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something…” — Countee Cullen | V2Melody

“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

About Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen

30 May 1903–9 January 1946

On May 30, 1903, a child was born who would become one of the most celebrated voices of the Harlem Renaissance, yet whose origins remain shrouded in the kind of mystery that seems almost poetic in retrospect. Countee Cullen's exact birthplace has been disputed—some records suggest New York City, others Louisville…

More by Countee Cullen

Poems by Countee Cullen

More remarks by Countee Cullen

“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

“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

“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