Volume 39, Number 5 · March 5, 1992
The Sweet Singer of Tuckahoe
By Darryl Pinckney
My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance
edited by Gerald Early
Anchor Books, 618 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Countee Cullen was the Edna St. Vincent Millay of the Harlem Renaissance. Virtually every poem of this romanticized writer was read by blacks as well as whites as a gesture, or even a 'monument to the New Negro movement.' Before the publication of his first collection, Color, in 1925, when he was twenty-two, Cullen was already being celebrated, partly perhaps because he demonstrated that a black could turn out high-minded heroic couplets. Dead at forty-two, he has also come down to us in numerous anthologies of American poetry as something of a boy wonder who was silenced before his time, like the Romantic poets who were his models.
Review, 4573 words
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