Heritage

Countee Cullen was an African American poet who achieved immense success in the white-dominated American and European academic and literary establishments. In 1928, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, which took him to France, and his aesthetic owes more to European Romantic poetry than to earlier African American literature. He modeled himself after John Keats, one of the greatest English poets of the early 19th century. Cullen’s goal was to excel as a Black poet within the framework of the English poetic tradition. He believed in the color-blind universality of poetry, even as he wrote poems like “Heritage” which are imbued with African American themes and sentiments. Cullen’s reliance on traditional poetic forms rendered criticism of abandoning his heritage by being an over-educated Europhile. However, Cullen was fully aware of “play[ing] a double part” (Line 98), as he puts it in the poem. While the speaker in “Heritage” is not necessarily Cullen, the poem reflects the poet’s ambivalence of being pulled by two opposing forces: on the one hand, the restraint and orderliness of Anglo-American poetic and religious traditions, and on the other, the nearly uncontrollable grief and anger that mark Afro-American history.