Countee Cullen: A Black Poet During The Harlem Renaissance

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Throughout the span of the Harlem Renaissance, black poets used their poems to tell the story of their people's struggles as a way to bring light to the injustice they had faced in America. They used their poems not only to reflect, but to empower the next generations to keep up the fight toward equality. Each poet during the time period was unique, but two of the poets used nearly opposite approaches to achieve the same goal, and each were very successful. Langston Hughes, a black man from Joplin, Missouri, came from a very versatile background. Hughes lived in many different places during his younger years and took experiences from each as influence in his poetry (1773). Countee Cullen came from a more structured background …show more content…
Cullen was able to perfect the structure of poetry during his time spent at Columbia and Harvard. It is displayed in his works. Cullen almost arrogantly uses and masters many different forms of structure to show that he is an educated black man. A few examples being the sonnet styling of "Yet Do I Marvel" and the quatrain styling of "Incident" and "Simon the Cyrenian Speaks." Langston Hughes differs when it comes to poetry structure. Hughes came from the school of Walt Whitman and did not follow or need structure for his poems. The free verse style may have been due to lack of knowledge of poem structure, or maybe even as a boycott of white man rules, but the absence of structure did nothing to dim the light of Hughes' poetry. Knowing about the structure used by these two poets, the idea of difference between being a black poet and poet who is black is evident. Cullen was a poet first, following the guidelines of poetry structure, and also telling the story of struggle. Hughes was more fixated on the story that needed to be told, and used the form he saw best fit to carry the message to his
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