The St. Paul echo., 1926-03-27
BOOK REVIEW
"COLOR"
Countee p. Cullen.
$500 net. Harper and brothers,
New York and London, 1925.

New York and London, 1925.
William Dean Howells is reputeG
as having said that Paul Lawrence
Dunbar was "the only man OF
American Civilization that felt Negro
life aesthetically and expressed il
lyrically." Dunbar was twenty-foul
when he published his first volume
and now comes another Negro youth
slightly younger than he was with
perhaps a greater aesthetic concep.
ton, and surely greater aesthetic
conception, and surely a greater
lyrical execution. Countee Cullen il
the youngster, and he is now TWEEN
ty-year-old student at New York
University.
Besides winning the Amy Spin.
garn Prize, the Yale Younger Poets
Contest, and host of smaller
awards too numerous to mention, he
has completed one degree at the Uni.
versity, has been elected to Phi Beta
Kappa, and is now taking his Mas.
ter's degree at the same school. Mr.
Cullen's success was immediate upon
the publishing of his first book
Color" like Edna St.
Vincent Millay he sprang into
prominence over night, and we are
inclined to believe that even greater
things can be expected of this man
when he has tempered his youthful
spirit with the wisdom of maturity
Mr.. Cullen has unlimited versatility
it seems, and he is able to write upon
any subject from titles pertaining to
the defense of his down-trodden race
to light capricious love songs.
We meet him in his most serious
mood in "The Shroud of Color. u
His plea is:
Lord, being dark"
said, Il cannot bear
The further touch of earth, the
scented air;
Lord, being dark, forewilled to that
despair
My color shrouds me in, 1 am as
dirt
Beneath my brothers heel; there is
hurt
In all the simple joys which to a
child.
Are sweet; they are contamlnate, de-
filed
By truths of wrongs the childish vi
sion fails
To see; too great a cost this birth en-
tails -. :"
Mr. Cullen has done something
that few other poets have been able
to do. In his section of twenty-nine
epitaphs he has written chapters in
to four lines. He reverts to the
Arabian Nights when he says:
For a Magician"
Il whose magic could explore
Ways others might not guess or see
Now am barred behind a door
Which has no open Sesame
Or he mingles humor with the in
evitable as one would add settler tt
drink to give it zest:
For a Lovely Lady"
"A creature slender as a reed,
And sad-eyed as a doe
Lies here (but take my word for it
And do not pry below"
In all of his attempts, serious ant
humorous, one can catch an under
current of understanding. One i.
inclined to weep with him when HI
weeps, and to dance on the hill wher
he does. He has feeling
perhaps too much at times
but feeling nevertheless. He has {
masterful vocabulary, but he some
times lets it run away with him /;
bit Gas he does his conceit), and con
sequently he is often rather ambig
uous. He often lets his poets Ii
cense go a bit too far for the sake O
rhyme, but his faults are all over
balanced completely by his youth ant
cleverness.
To those of us who have followe,
Mr.. Cullen since his first poems ap
peared in periodicals it SEEM
strange that some of his earlies
works (and some of the best) hav
been omitted from this collection
We searched in vain to find his de
lightful Spark" and a few other
which we thought surely wer
worthy of a place in his first book
The main fault we find in Color" il
not in the poetry itself, but that
seems to be poorly edited. There i
a Encouragement, so to speak, ant
it is fairly safe to say that the bool
could have been far more enjoyable
had little more care been exercised
on the formal.
All in all we may safely say tina
we have in Countee Cullen a maj
who has taken up the work of Pau
Dunbar, where the latter left off
but he is approaching the situation
from different angl. He 'feel
Negro life aesthetically and ex
presses it lyrically;" he feels life it
self keenly and expresses it phil