Incident

“Review: ‘Color,’ by Countee Cullen” by Herbert S. Gorman (1925)

In this New York Times review of Color, the volume in which “Incident” first appeared, Gorman praises Cullen as a promising young poet. He notes that “Mr. Cullen is race-conscious and many of his poems are imbued with a somewhat bitter note, but they are all lifted by that indefinable thing which we call poetry.” The implication of that comment is that a focus on race is a burden that diminishes the power of Cullen’s poetry. In that context, writing a poem about a Black child’s encounter with racism is a form of protest against Eurocentric ideas about art and representation.

“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes (1926)

In this seminal essay of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes takes to task:

[o]ne of the most promising of the young Negro poets [who] 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 a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white.’

Hughes is likely referring to Cullen, who wrote harsh reviews of poets like Hughes because of his dislike of jazz and other elements taken from Black popular culture in the poetry. Hughes’s decision to target Cullen is a measure of how influential Cullen was in Black literary circles. The essay also marks a split in the aesthetic of Harlem Renaissance poets. Poets like Hughes were more in line with the experimental mood of American poetry during the 1920s, while poets like Cullen believed mastery of traditional forms would show the craft of Black writers and allow them to make their mark on poetry in English. Cullen lost that fight, leading to his diminished reputation by the 1930s. “Incident” shows that, while he relied on traditional English forms, he used those forms to explore aspects of the Black experience in the United States.

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets edited by Countee Cullen (1927)

Cullen exercised great influence in the world of Black American poetry early in the Harlem Renaissance. In his foreword to the anthology, Cullen argues that any “survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue” (xii), by which he means that Black American poetry isn’t a monolith that is defined by particular themes and styles. In selecting the poems for the collection, Cullen finds that these Black poets are simply “trying to maintain the higher traditions of English verse” (xii). The foreword and Cullen’s editorial choices provide context for his use of traditional English form, the ballad, to capture the then-contemporary experience of Black Americans confronting racism.

“Countee Cullen: The Reluctant Lamb” by Darryl Pinckney (2013)

In this review of biographer Charles Molesworth’s And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countee Cullen (2013), Pinckney provides details about the ups and downs of Cullen’s literary reputation. He describes the impact of the Great Depression, anti-gay bias, and a rejection of Cullen’s formal style as racially inauthentic on Cullen, who withdrew from public life as a writer as time went on. Pinckney notes that Cullen had a complicated perspective on race in literature in that “[h]e was against the preachiness of uplift in black literature, but he believed in decorum on the page.” This complex relationship with race is on display in “Incident.” “Incident” is certainly a poem on a racial theme, but it is one in which awareness of race and racism is a regrettable fall from innocence. There is no impulse to connect this individual fall to a larger discussion about race.