Countee Cullen Poem Analysis

Countee Cullen was an African American writer who was famous for writing poems and writing a very popular novel. He had a very good education when he was growing up and attended very popular universities. He was writing poems in the Harlem Renaissance time period, which was the time of the African American great migration during the middle of the 1930s. Countee Cullen was born on May 20 although due to conflicting accounts of his early life it is still unknown. Cullen’s exact place of birth is known, but there are some sources that state that he could have been born in Louisville, Kentucky, Baltimore, and New York City. It is known if Cullen was possibly abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Porter, who was probably his parental grandmother. Porter brought young Cullen to Harlem when he was nine; she ended up dying in 1918. No known reliable information exists of his childhood until 1918 when he was taken in, or adopted, by Reverend and Mrs. Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, New York City. The Reverend was the local minister, and founder,

He has written “Thoughts in a Zoo” which depicts the life these African Americans had to live through while living through the Harlem Renaissance. The poem says on how they were treated like animals locked up in a cage. They didn’t have any rights and couldn’t live freely as they should have. Another poem the he wrote was “The Wise”, which is about how older people have the greatest knowledge and are very wise since they have been through a lot in their lives and know what to do and what not to do. Another one of his poems “Song in Spite of Myself” is him telling the reader not to love all at once, never live with all your mind, never love with all your soul which is telling you not to love something right away and to take time to love for who or what they are because if something goes wrong then it will hurt you the