On These I Stand

COUNTEE CULLEN has been treated by reviewers of the last twenty years in ways he certainly could not control and probably did not invite. In their eagerness to find a poet who could express the tremendous art-force of the American Negro, the reviewers have hailed book after book as a promise of great things to come. Now Cullen’s untimely death has put a last period to promise. This edition of his selected poems is total. And if the total disappoints the large claims that have been made for him, Countee Cullen may yet be remembered in years to come as one of the most engaging early voices of a great body of literature which only recently has begun to emerge.

Though circumstance made it inevitable that Cullen treat racial themes, his natural impulse seems to be toward the literary poem. One feels he is happiest in his sonnets to Keats and in his variations of the “made ballad" (as opposed to the “artless ballad”). At his best (“A Brown Girl Dead,”“Incident,”and the familiar “Heritage” among others) Cullen shows a real gift for the neat, sensitive, and immediate lyric. When the observation contained in the poem is direct and personal, dealing immediately with people seen and events that really occurred, the poems emerge movingly.

Too often, however, the treatment is marred by a taint of “artiness" that is too obviously derivative. The grand Millay manner studded with “I fain would,”"albeit,”and “yet do I ponder" is a bit too coyly of the Village and the High Twenties to be carved on the lynching tree. This taint of artiness, an overready reliance on the poetic cliché, a weakness for bookish literary forms, and a regrettable insensitivity to the spoken language flaw too many of the poems. It is for the one poem in ten that emerges whole that Countee Cullen will be remembered.

JOHN CIARDI