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Language Relating To Context In Countee Cullen's Yet Do I Marvel

1227 Words5 Pages

Alessandra Gonzalez-Valdez
English Composition 1302
Professor Lopez
21 April, 2023
Language Relating to Context in Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” During the American pre-civil War period, sometime after, and even now, black Americans were treated unjustly and silenced. “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen expresses his faith and how God chose to make a poet black, meaning why God would make him a poet if his voice wasn’t going to be listened to. The context of Cullen’s poem connects to the use of his language in ways that represent the Jim Crow laws period and the Harlem Renaissance, where he questions his faith, specifically why God allowed such suffering. “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen is a poem wrote about Cullen's faith and God’s choices. …show more content…

Cullen was well-accepted in white communities, this made it easier for him to talk about racial inequality and his experiences. An event that promoted him to write was World War I when many African Americans served in the U.S. Army and came back to be treated unequally and laid off from their jobs. The context of the war connects back to the language Cullen uses in ways that he has already experienced inequality and has been a bystander especially when it comes to God’s torturous decisions, Cullen understands yet he “Marvels” better yet, wonders.
In conclusion, the sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen uses language to connect to the context of the writing in ways that represent events of the period, such as the Jim Crow laws and the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen’s language use such as talking about Greek gods plus stories, death, and even questioning God and his morality ties together with the context of African American inequality during the 1920s. Not only that but it connects with other contexts such as World War I and even other works published around the same time Cullen’s poem was released such as “A New Negro” by Alain …show more content…

“Countee Cullen.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/countee-cullen. Accessed 16 April 2023.
Sánchez-Pardo, Esther. "Melancholia, the New Negro, and the Fear of Modernity: Forms Sublime and Denigrated in Countee Cullen's Writings." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 220, Gale, 2009. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420091563/LitRC?u=txshracd2487&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=435e3539. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023. Originally published in Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 343-385
Leonard, Keith D. "'To Make a Poet Black': Constructing an Ethnic Poetics in Harlem Renaissance Poetry." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 218, Gale, 2009. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420090820/LitRC?u=txshracd2487&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=bfa4838d. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023. Originally published in Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights, University of Virginia Press, 2006, pp.

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