An Explosion of Culture

834 Words2 Pages

The poems “Yet Do I Marvel”, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, and “Tenebris” by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Angelina Grimké, respectively, reflect attitudes towards the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, which spanned the early twentieth century, brought about an explosion of African American culture that spread throughout the world. These poems use the figurative language techniques of allusion, personification, and imagery to reflect the ideas of many participants in the Harlem Renaissance, including revolution and unfairness.
The first of these poems, “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen, presents the idea of African Americans not being able to express their culture during the Harlem Renaissance through allusions to Greek mythology. In his poem, Cullen wishes that God would “Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus / Is baited by the fickle fruit” (Cullen 1275). In the Greek myth of Tantalus, Tantalus was sentenced to stand in neck deep water that he could not drink, with a bowl of fruit close by that he could not reach. Throughout history, African Americans had always been treated unfairly, always being known as a race inferior to others, and Cullen expresses the questioning feeling that African Americans had during the Harlem Renaissance through this allusion. They were confused as to why God was punishing them. Cullen goes on to ponder an idea: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (Cullen 1275). Literary critic Fred M. Fetrow, in his review of the poem in the Explicator, a literary review journal, explains his view of a black poet singing, claiming that “Any African American poet writing in 1925 would have found it difficult…to ‘sing’ of his blackness without...

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...arlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers.” PMLA 105.1 (1990): 47-56. JSTOR. Web. 24 April 2014.
Cullen, Countee. “Yet Do I Marvel.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013. 1275. Print.
Fetrow, Fred M. “Cullen’s Yet Do I Marvel.” The Explicator 56.2 (1998): 103-105. Literary Reference Center. Web. 23 April 2014.
Grimké, Angelina. “Tenebris.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013. 1277. Print.
Haynes, Robert V. “The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Book Review).” American Historical Review 83.2 (1978): 554-555. Literary Reference Center. Web. 24 April 2014.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013. 1278. Print.

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