Color

Countee Cullen was a student at New York University when he published this first book of poems, which made him famous at twenty-two. It includes 'Heritage', which begins 'What is Africa to me?'; 'Yet Do I Marvel', which ends with the lines 'Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!'; and 'Incident', a short, painful memory of a racial insult in Baltimore, alongside poems of love, faith and death in traditional forms.

Cullen (1903–1946) was one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and Color, published in 1925, was among its most praised books. Read Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows and Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues.