Making It New: 1900–1945 493annual Anthology of Magazine Verse, which began in 1913. In his criticism, he
championed poets like Frost and Robinson, Dunbar and Cullen. And in his own
poetry, published in Lyrics of Love and Life (1904), House of Falling Leaves (1908),
and Selected Poems (1948), he showed the influence of such favorite writers as Keats
and Wordsworth. Spencer, born Annie Bethel Scales, similarly preferred nonracial
themes and traditional lyric forms. She could find, she confessed, “no civilized
articulation” for the things she hated, such as racial prejudice. So, using elaborate
rhythmic patterns, highly wrought language, and densely woven imagery, she
explored the personal but also universal subjects of life and time (“Substitution”
(1927)), love and peace (“For Jim, Easter Eve” (1949)), nature and beauty (“Lines to
a Nasturtium” (1926)).
Countee Cullen is a slightly more complicated case. Publishing his most important
collection of poems, Color (1925), when he was still young, he quickly became a
significant figure in the New Negro movement. As literary editor of Opportunity, one
of the two most important black periodicals of the 1920s, he also exercised
considerable influence. Cullen did explore race in some of his work. A poem like
“Incident” (1924), for instance, recalls the first time when he was called “nigger,”
when he “was eight and very small.” “From the Dark Tower” (1924) expresses the
hopes that black people “shall not always plant while others reap.” The title piece in
The Black Christ, and Other Poems (1929) recounts the lynching of a black youth for
a crime he did not commit. Most interesting of all perhaps, “Scottsboro, Too, Is
Worth Its Song” (1934), subtitled “A poem to American poets,” asks why no poets have
written about one of the most notorious examples of racial injustice to occur in the
1930s. Cullen, however, was inclined to place his poems about his African-American
heritage in a kind of ghetto: in each of his first three collections there is a section
specifically entitled “Color.” And even these poems, although about that heritage, are
not definitively of it. “What is Africa to me,” begins one piece actually called “Heritage”
(1925): “One three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved, / Spicy grove,
cinnamon tree, / What is Africa to me?” Cullen wanted, he said, to be “a poet, not
a Negro poet,” adding elsewhere, “the individual diversifying ego transcends the
synthesizing hue.” So, for the actual forms and language of his verse, he chose as his
models poets like Keats and was largely content to follow Romantic convention.
Sometimes, the pain involved in his struggle always to sound nonracial, and usually
to concentrate on nonracial subjects, breaks through the discreet surfaces of his
work. “My color shrouds me,” he admits in “Heritage”; and in “Yet Do I Marvel”
(1925) he laments, “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black and
bid him sing!” But, as a rule, he refused to think or write in terms of a distinctive
ethnic heritage. In response “To Certain Critics” (1925) who had apparently
questioned this refusal, he was quite adamant: “never shall the clan / ,” he insisted,
“Confine my singing to its ways / Beyond the ways of man.” For Cullen, evidently, his
identity as black could and had to be cordoned off from the rest of his being and
experience; and, in any event, it was more or less incompatible with his role as poet.
In the transitional generation of African-American poets following Hughes and
Cullen, the most articulate spokesmen for Cullen’s position were Melvin B. TolsonGGray_c04.indd 493ray_c 04 .indd 493 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM