The Black poet's cultural identity - FANT IV

The Black Poet’s Cultural Identity

Marshall A. Fant IV

IntroductionHarlem in the 1920’s

Considered the “densest, and most socially vibrant black urban community in America” (Anderson).Birthplace of the “Harlem Renaissance”

Significant PoetsCountee CullenLangston HughesJean ToomerJessie Fauset Gwendolyn BennettClaude McKay

Cullen and Hughesa comparison

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen

Only “renaissance” poet to have spent his childhood in Harlem

Importance of language as a connection with the past

“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” (Cullen in Caroling Dusk, a collection of poems, page xi)

Countee Cullen

Only “renaissance” poet to have spent his childhood in Harlem

Importance of language as a connection with the past

“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” (Cullen in Caroling Dusk, a collection of poems, page xi)

Countee Cullen (cont’d)

Importance of Language (cont’d)Insisted he was a black man writing verse and not a distinctly “Negro poet.”

Used Keats as “his chief ‘poetic model’” (Primeau 74).

Demonstration of style“Yet Do I Marvel”

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Yet Do I MarvelI doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did he stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Cullen “Yet Do I Marvel” (cont’d)

FeaturesTraditional sonnet in iambic pentameter

Classical mythological allusionTantalus

Sisyphus

Assumes Biblical (Christian) understanding of man

God is good, well-meaning, kind, (1)

Flesh that mirrors Him must some day die, (4)

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune / To catechism (9-10)

Critical Views of Cullen’s Style

Ann Colley condemned this choice of style by saying Cullen “loses [a] sense of his blackness when he writes poems using forms such as the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and rime royal” because he is then “expressing himself in terms of the white experience—not the Black” (Primeau 77).

Wallace Thurman, a black novelist, disliked Cullen for being “too steeped in tradition, too influenced mentally by certain conventions and taboos” and for forsaking the “lower elements” of black culture, namely his reluctance to include jazz rhythms in his work (Anderson 32).

Cullen’s Style (cont’d)

Lack of “be-bop” style did not mean that Cullen neglected the racial tensions of his time.

Publication of Color, a book of poems that dealt exclusively with the race issue.

Best known poem from this collection: “Incident”

IncidentOnce riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit biggerAnd so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.” I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December; Of all the things that happened there

That’s all that I remember.

IncidentOnce riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit biggerAnd so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.” I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December; Of all the things that happened there

That’s all that I remember.

Cullen’s Style (cont’d)

Cullen held to his position saying that blues and jazz probably could not “belong to that dignified company [. . .] of high literary expression which we call poetry” (Ramazani 685).

He said that this poetic style allowed him to express the “heights and the depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro” (Ramazani 726).

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

Found his poetic identity not in a connection with the great European poets but in his ethnic connection to Africa and especially the burgeoning sound of jazz (Ramazani 685-6).

He thought Cullen’s dependence on European tradition was dishonest.

Hughes on Cullen

Hughes wrote that, “[Cullen] said to me once, ‘I want to be a POET—not a NEGRO POET,’ meaning, I believe, ‘I want to write like a white poet’; meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be like a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white’” (Bolden 6).Hughes wanted to celebrate being black by employing black poetic technique.White men were not to be viewed as “models for positive behavior” while blacks were associated with “negative behavior,” for Hughes believed this tendency would in the end breed “self-hatred” for the black individual (Bolden 6-7).

Hughes’ StyleHughes attempted to capture in his poetry both the “realities of American life and the realities of the American language” (Rampersad 4).

This meant that little of his poetry was founded in the traditions white poets or writers, but in the reality of the common “blues, jazz, work songs, ballads, and spirituals” he used for material (Ramazini 684).

This was also based upon the view that the English language was not an inheritance for black folk at all but was violently imposed upon them as slaves (Bolden 6).

Hughes’ Rhythm

Illustration:

“Dream Boogie” from Montage of a Dream Deferred

Dream BoogieGood morning, daddy!Ain’t you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred? Listen closely:You’ll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a –

You think It’s a happy beat?

 Listen to it closely:Ain’t you heardsomething underneathlike a—  

What did I say? Sure,I’m happy!Take it away! 

Hey, pop!Re-bop!

Mop!

Y-e-a-h!

Dream BoogieGood morning, daddy!Ain’t you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred? Listen closely:You’ll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a –

You think It’s a happy beat?

Hughes and Whitman

Though Hughes’s poetry can tend towards the “doggerel,” he learned from the example of poet Walt Whitman that America was primed for the unconventional in poetic style (Rampersad 5).

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had “revolutionized American verse in the nineteenth century,” and Hughes was prepared to write to “the black masses” in the twentieth century by taking jazz and making it poetic (Rampersad 4-5)

A Distinctly Negro Style

A new and distinctly “Negro” style.

Soon after he began writing, Critic Alain Locke said that Hughes, whose poetry was “saturated with the rhythms and moods of Negro folk life,” had become a true “people’s poet” for the black American (Bolden 7).

He not only used offbeat jazz rhythms, but also popularized the style “primitivism,” demonstrated in his first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than

the flow of human blood in human veins.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.  I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.  I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above

it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

 I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than

the flow of human blood in human veins.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.  I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.  I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above

it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

 I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than

the flow of human blood in human veins.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.  I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.  I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above

it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

 I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The Negro Speak of Rivers (analysis)

Hughes uses long, deep phrases to signify his earthy connection with the water.

He states the subject, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” then gradually moves from the Euphrates rivers at the beginning of time to modern day New Orleans (3).

Hughes and ChristianityThe black poets’ indifference to “conventional social judgment” provided the foundation for Hughes to reject not only European conventions, but also Christianity (Anderson, 27).

Even though Cullen had successfully utilized Christian symbols in works like The Black Christ & Other Poems, Hughes dismissed this white-man’s religion.

• In “Goodbye Christ,” he spoke of the Bible as, “dead now,” because “The popes and the preachers’ve / Made too much money from it” (6-8).

• Instead, he sought to replace Christianity with the figure of “Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME— / I said, ME!“ (22-3).

Hughes and Cullen Contrasted

• Hughes, following the color of his skin to his ethnic birthplace found life and rhythm in his poetry.

• Cullen, religiously keeping the traditions given to him by the European masters found convention his key for expressing what Keats called “the sweetness of the pain” (Primeau 75).

Conclusion

• Both grappled with the question of which past would be more effective, more legitimate for the black author and audience to accept.

• Though their answers differed, they both offered a singular message that was unparalleled in power.