By: Marissa Watson

An African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North (1914–18), many who came to New York settled in Harlem, as well as a good number of black New Yorkers moved from other areas of the city. Meanwhile, Southern black musicians brought jazz with them to the North and to Harlem. The area soon became a sophisticated literary and artistic center.

Countee Cullen Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was raised in a Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York. Began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in The Crisis.

Countee Cullen(cont.) Raised and educated in a white community, and differed from other poets of the Harlem Renaissance because he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists. He died in 1946.

Lines to My Father by Countee Cullen The many sow, but only the chosen reap; Happy the wretched host if Day be brief, That with the cool oblivion of sleep A dawnless Night may soothe the smart of grief. If from the soil our sweat enriches sprout One meagre blossom for our hands to cull, Accustomed indigence provokes a shout Of praise that life becomes so bountiful. Now ushered regally into your own, Look where you will, as far as eye can see, Your little seeds are to a fullness grown, And golden fruit is ripe on every tree. Yours is no fairy gift, no heritage Without travail, to which weak wills aspire; This is a merited and grief-earned wage From One Who holds His servants worth their hire. So has the shyest of your dreams come true, Built not of sand, but of the solid rock, Impregnable to all that may accrue Of elemental rage: storm, stress, and shock.

Lines to My Father This poem means that the white people do not do anything and they make the black people do the hard work. The 2 nd and 3 rd stanza talks about how one ounce of hope can bring so many joys and happy thoughts even though they may or may not come true. The 4 th stanza talks about how people have to work for what they get and it isn’t just given to them. The last stanza says how nothing can break through the rage and stress that life throws at you.

The Literary Devices: Rhyming- All the blue words rhyme in the poem some how. Imagery- It talks about how the smallest seed can grow into something INCREDIBLE. The many sow, but only the chosen reap; Happy the wretched host if Day be brief, That with the cool oblivion of sleep A dawnless Night may soothe the smart of grief. If from the soil our sweat enriches sprout One meagre blossom for our hands to cull, Accustomed indigence provokes a shout Of praise that life becomes so bountiful. Now ushered regally into your own, Look where you will, as far as eye can see, Your little seeds are to a fullness grown, And golden fruit is ripe on every tree. Yours is no fairy gift, no heritage Without travail, to which weak wills aspire; This is a merited and grief-earned wage From One Who holds His servants worth their hire. So has the shyest of your dreams come true, Built not of sand, but of the solid rock, Impregnable to all that may accrue Of elemental rage: storm, stress, and shock.