8 - Lyric stars: Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes

Summary

Many people have considered the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes to represent two antagonistic strands of Harlem Renaissance thinking about the role of the black artist, the nature of African American literature, and indeed whether something called “Negro Literature” existed. It is unquestionably true that the two poets themselves to some extent felt such an antagonism, as seen most famously in Hughes' 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” that began with a sort of racial syllogism attributed to an unnamed Negro poet in which the statement “I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet” becomes “I would like to be white.” While Hughes does not name the poet, the opening premise of this syllogism closely resembles a statement Cullen made during a 1924 interview in which he declared, “if I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.”

Hughes, too, is well known as the progenitor of a new black vernacular lyric poetry, particularly the genre of blues poetry, while the statement “White folks is white” in the first line of Cullen's “Uncle Jim” represents practically the entirety of his published verse directly utilizing some version of a distinctly African American idiom.