Born Countee Porter, in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was the adopted son of Reverend Frederick Cullen, the prominent minister and pastor of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem. The precocious Countee began writing poetry while in elementary school and his first published poem, "I Have a Rendezvous With Life," was featured in his high school's literary magazine.

Cullen was an outstanding student at the esteemed Dewitt Clinton High School. Countee was elected to class office and to ARISTA, the scholastic honor society. At graduation, Cullen received recognition in Latin, mathematics, English, history and French.

At the age of nineteen, Countee began his college studies at New York University. There, he published poems in both "The Crisis" and "Opportunity." Shortly thereafter, Cullen won several awards for his poem, "Ballad of the Brown Girl." The talented poet graduated from NYU in 1923 and entered Harvard University that fall. That very same year he published his first book of verse, called "Color."

By the time his second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), was released, Cullen was meeting with some controversy in the black community. Unlike Langston Hughes, Cullen was educated in a white community and lacked the black experiences to match those of Hughes. His style was more in line with Keats and Shelley and he seldom wrote about the issues close to his black peers.

The poet went on to teach French and English at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, PS 139. He authored "One Way to Heaven" and then collaborated with Arna Bontemps on "Gods Sends Sunday," which was later to become a play and a Broadway musical entitled St. Louis Woman.

Cullen died in 1946 just a few months before the musical began its successful run on Broadway.

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!