19 pages • 38 minutes read
For A Poet
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Heritage” by Countee Cullen (1925)
In his most famous poem, Cullen conducts an artistic examination of the expected subject matter of African American poets and the assumptions of the Négritude movement. It is a long poem of irregular stanzas composed of rhyming couplets that evoke the common traits of African art, lush forests and exotic animals, while questioning the reception of these subjects amidst affluent and largely indifferent white audiences. Cullen’s growing anger is palpable throughout the poem, and it concludes with a similar form of self-council to “For a Poet,” in which Cullen recognizes that he must repress his hate and wrath to continue on as an artist.
“My Little Dreams” by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1918)
A poem with a strikingly similar sentiment to “For a Poet,” Johnson’s eight-line poem includes the action of hiding one’s dreams away, and it uses this image as an initiating and concluding refrain. Johnson was another prominent poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and her home became an important meeting place for artists and poets of the time. The similarity of Johnson’s sentiment to Cullen’s speaks to a bitter commonality shared by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and is another striking testimony to the self-repression African American poets felt was necessary for wider acceptance.
“Dream Boogie” by Langston Hughes (1951)
Hughes, another luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, represents the avant-garde of the movement with his free appropriation of the rhythms and slang of jazz, be-bop, and the blues. In this free-wheeling poem, Hughes approaches Cullen’s subject matter—the need to defer dreams—in his characteristic manner. It reads as a call-and-answer sing along where the speaker ultimately suggests that the easiest way to cope with the drudgery of existence is to deny inner feeling and convince oneself of a perpetual, though hollow, happiness. Cullen would disagree with Hughes’s Modernist techniques and his decision to focus on, to Cullen, less-appealing aspects of Black culture. But Cullen did respect Hughes as a consummate artist.
Further Literary Resources
Color by Countee Cullen, digitized by University of Nebraska Lincoln
This is a digital version of Countee Cullen’s first collection of poetry. It includes “For a Poet,” as well as “Incident,” “Heritage,” and all of the other poems mentioned in this guide. It is worth exploring to see how Cullen structured his collection and how the sections approach his fraught relationship with racialized subject matter, all of which further contextualize Cullen’s sentiment in “For a Poet.” This is the first edition of the collection, however, and “For a Poet” is missing the dedication to John Gaston Edgar that Cullen added in the 1928 second edition.
Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets edited by Countee Cullen, digitized by University of Nebraska Lincoln
When Cullen was in his last year of the Harvard master’s program, he was asked to edit this important anthology of established and up-and-coming African American poets. The collection was lauded in its time and still serves as an important repository of well-known and obscure poets from the time. Of particular interest, however, is Cullen’s introduction to the collection, which contains the clearest proclamation of his desire to be seen in non-racialized terms, and also his advocation for all African American poets to be viewed simply as poets first and foremost.
“The Social Contributions of the Harlem Renaissance” by Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
This is a three-lesson curriculum, including a bibliography and a reading list, for a course on the social contributions of the Harlem Renaissance. It contains an extensive look at social and historical factors that enabled the Harlem Renaissance to flower, the resulting consequences of it on the people of Harlem and the rest of America, and finally the circumstances that led to a definitive end of the movement with the 1935 Harlem riots.
Listen to Poem
Clare Ellis, Head of Teaching and Learning at The Reader, reads and introduces Countee Cullen’s poem “For a Poet.”
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