Countee Mullen: Poem Analysis

It is clear from the word “I” that at this point Countee is no longer referencing Greek Gods and classic sonnet’s structure, but rather is digging deep into his own experiences. Countee marvels at the fact that God made him both a poet and black. Being black and a poet may be contradictory to white America at the time, and our speaker finds this concept central to his existence. Countee’s wonderment could be addressing how he “marvels” at the fact that despite being enslaved in the South, the turn of the century saw blacks reestablishing their identity in America. On the other hand, Cullen is marveling about why a God who is good could be so cruel to give a black poet the ability to “sing” in a world that ignores them. In this poem Cullen has
While I understand why this distinction was made, I believe in a sense it is kind of an intellectual cop out, because poetry itself is fundamentally predicated on the interweaving of the personal and the universal. Part of what makes poetry and to a larger extent art as a whole so appealing to us, is that it has the power to go beyond the individual, beyond a group, or even a nation or even a time period. This seeming power to heal the divisions of time, space, region, and culture is incredibly important and all of the best poems in some way or another, address the common humanity we all have by acknowledging the likeness of human beings. Of course, the real critique of Cullen is not that he attempted to seek universality, but rather that his poetry was unnecessarily safe, too reliant on European sources and ultimately elitist. While I think this is a legitimate argument to make, I also disagree with the notion that Cullen refused to accept his race, or never truly injected himself into traditional poetic forms, and believe like Charles Molesworth that he chose to protest injustice in a more complex and nuanced
In many ways, this analysis makes logical sense, as ever since his youth Cullen stood at the crosshairs of educational achievement and cultural sophistication. Although combining educational achievement and cultural sophistication, through traditional structures of Anglo-Saxon poetry such as sonnets, is not inherently problematic, Dixon believes that Cullen struggled to affirm his race instead seeing it as a “shroud of color” with which he needed to find peace with. It is also worth noting that many of his critics including Dixon argued that Cullen spent focused too much of his unresolved attitude towards his religious background. Essentially this unresolved attitude refers to his internal fight to find peace with a Christianity that branded him a sinner due to his homosexuality. Others criticized Cullen for choosing to withhold many details from his early life, perhaps because he was illegitimate and his family was impoverished. In many ways, this notion that Cullen did not fully embrace his complex and multidimensional identity is at the heart of all criticism of him. Perhaps most prominently many believed that he struggled to embrace the duality of his identity as both an incredible poet and African