Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance By: Cody Arner

Description • Originally called the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen • He was born on March 30, 1903, but it has been difficult for scholars to place exactly where he was born, with whom he spent the very earliest years of his childhood, and where he spent them. New York City and Baltimore have been given as birthplaces. Cullen himself, on his college transcript at New York University, lists Louisville, Kentucky, as his place of birth. A few years later, when he had achieved considerable literary fame during the era known as the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, he was to assert that his birthplace was New York City, which he continued to claim for the rest of his life.

Countee Cullen • While in high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem "I Have a Rendezvous with Life," a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." At New York University (1921-1925), he wrote most of the poems for his first three volumes: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). If any event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of this rather shy black boy who, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure.

I Have A Rendezvous With Life • I have a rendezvous with Life,In days I hope will come,Ere youth has sped, and strength of mind,Ere voices sweet grow dumb.I have a rendezvous with Life,When Spring's first heralds hum.Sure some would cry it's better farTo crown their days with sleepThan face the road, the wind and rain,To heed the calling deep.Though wet nor blow nor space I fear,Yet fear I deeply, too,Lest Death should meet and claim me ereI keep Life's rendezvous.

I Have A Rendezvous With Life • The poem’s tone sounds like he is just talking to us about his meeting with his life. • Two Poetic Devices: • Personification: “Ere voices sweet grow dumb.” • Personification: “When Spring's first heralds hum.”Imagery: Wind, Rain, Fear

Interesting Facts • The Harlem Renaissance occurred during what was known as the "Jazz Age," a period that coincided with Prohibition and brought about underground speakeasies like the Cotton Club. • The Harlem Renaissance may be most well-known for its black literary figures inclulding Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Their works are still considered some of the best on the black American experience. • Activists like Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois laid a political foundation for the Harlem Renaissance. These men and others courageously spoke against racism and oppression in America and worldwide.

Works Cited • http://www.ehow.com/facts_5145062_harlem-renaissance.html • http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cullen/life.htm • http://www.poemhunter.com/count-e-cullen/ • http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmharlem1.html • speakartloud.wordpress.com

Harlem Renaissance