From The Dark Tower
18 pages • 36-minute read
Countee CullenFrom The Dark Tower
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Background
Authorial Context
Cullen wanted to be known as a poet rather than a Black poet or a poet who focuses on race. Many of his poems deal with time-honored themes such as love, religion, and death—without a racial lens. Cullen’s models were English poetry, especially the poetry of John Keats. He preferred to write in traditional forms. In this he differed from fellow Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who wrote experimental, free verse poems that would speak directly to African Americans.
However, Cullen also had a strong racial awareness. This could hardly be otherwise, given his early background. The Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, who adopted him when he was about 15 years old, was a prominent clergyman who was very active in the fight for racial justice. He was the main organizer of a large march that took place in Harlem in July 1917 to protest a race riot in East St Louis. He was active in other efforts to promote African American rights and became president of the Harlem branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The young Cullen must have absorbed much talk about racial topics at the family dinner table.
When Cullen began to publish his own poetry in his early 20s, he showed a marked awareness of the issue of race. This is apparent even in the title of his first book, Color. One poem in that collection is of particular interest. In “Incident,” the speaker, who likely represents the poet himself, recalls something that happened to him in Baltimore when he was eight years old. He smiles at a white boy of about the same age, but the boy responds by sticking his tongue out and uttering a racial epithet that begins with the letter “n.” The speaker comments that although he explored Baltimore from May to December, that is the only thing he remembers about it, a conclusion that shows the impact that such race-based hostility must have had on him.
In 1926, which was about the time he was writing “From the Dark Tower,” Cullen reluctantly acknowledged the importance of race. Alan R. Shucard underscores this reluctant acknowledgment in his book Countee Cullen, in a passage in which Cullen may even have had “Incident” in mind:
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. There have been many things in my life that have hurt me, and I find that the surest relief from these hurts is in writing (qtd. in Shucard 31).
The following year, when he came to arrange the poems that make up Copper Sun, Cullen allotted more importance to the race element. All seven poems in the first section are about race, whether directly or obliquely, before they give way to more traditional content in the remainder of the book.
Historical Context
The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion in African American culture, including literature, music, art, and drama, that began in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in the 1910s and continued into the mid-1930s. Harlem had been steadily growing in population in the early years of the 20th century, as African Americans from other parts of the city, as well as thousands of newcomers from the South, moved there.
The Harlem Renaissance announced a new self-confidence and richness in African American culture, in which its hopes, difficulties, and aspirations were laid out in a wide variety of forms. As Langston Hughes, one of the great poets of the movement, wrote in The Nation in 1926:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves (qtd. in Shucard 2).
When Cullen first burst onto Harlem’s literary scene in 1925, the new movement was in full swing, and for thousands of African Americans, Harlem was the place to be. African American writer James Weldon Johnson, in his 1925 essay “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” described the neighborhood as follows:
In the make-up of New York, Harlem is not merely a Negro colony or community, it is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world. It is not a slum or a fringe, it is located in the heart of Manhattan and occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful sections of the city. It is not a “quarter” of dilapidated tenements, but is made up of new-law apartments and handsome dwellings, with well-paved and well-lighted streets. It has its own churches, social and civic centers, shops, theaters and other places of amusement. And it contains more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth.
In terms of poetry, Langston Hughes wanted to reach a wide audience with his free verse, some of which was influenced by jazz rhythms. Another Harlem Renaissance poet, Claude McKay, wrote, like Cullen, in more traditional forms, including the sonnet. His approach to racial injustice was sometimes more strident and militant than Cullen’s, as his sonnet “If We Must Die” shows. In that poem, he calls for aggressive resistance to racial oppression. It was written in 1919 in response to race riots that year in Chicago and other cities.
Other major literary figures in the Harlem Renaissance included Wallace Thurman, whose novel The Blacker the Berry was published in 1929. Zora Neale Hurston is lastingly known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and poet and novelist Jean Toomer attracted favorable attention with his novel Cane (1923).
Notable in the field of music during the Harlem Renaissance were jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, blues singer Bessie Smith, and composer and singer Fats Waller. The Apollo Theatre and the Cotton Club in Harlem were renowned venues for music during this period.
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