If Langston Hughes was the cool kid at school with his own rock band, then Countee Cullen was the quiet improvisario who could play the most complex of violin solos.

Not that Cullen wasn't cool. He was just more of classical dude than Hughes.

But like Hughes, he was also a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. While still a grad student at Harvard (lots of Ivy Leaguers among the HR crew, you may have noticed), he wrote a lot of what would become his first book of poetry. How's that for ambition?

Cullen even married W.E.B. Du Bois's daughter. They later divorced, but still—you can't get more with the "in" crowd than that.

Above all, Cullen's real contribution to the Harlem Renaissance was not his sociability or his precociousness, however. It was his poetic style. He was into traditional formal structures, like the sonnet, but he was not into traditional topics.

Some people have called him a wannabe white academic for modeling his poetry after people like John Keats. And it's true that Cullen didn't really like to use forms that referenced "blackness." He even pressed Langston Hughes to stop writing in a "black form" that was infused with jazz and the blues.

But Cullen had his reasons behind his artistic decisions, and he could be pretty radical in his own right. He wrote a poem called "The Black Christ," after all. That doesn't sound apolitical to us.

"Yet Do I Marvel"

Can black writers write? Uh, well, duh. But hold your intellectual horses, Shmoopers; we're sorry to say that this was a serious question back in Countee Cullen's day.

At that time, many people still believed that African Americans weren't supposed to be writers, artists, intellectuals… or anything else that required a brain, talent, and skill. If the popular thinking had been otherwise, we wouldn't have ended up with slavery and then Jim Crow laws.

So, Cullen showed everyone just what a black writer could do, all while tackling an even bigger conundrum: the ways of God. Yep. Cullen was all about taking on big writerly challenges. Go ahead and marvel away. We'll allow it.

"The Ballad of the Brown Girl"

Cullen was a traditionalist. He wasn't even being ironic when he wrote a poem with the title, "The Ballad of the Brown Girl." Nope, this is a straight-up ballad, for which, by the way, he won a slew of awards.

Why? Let's just say that even though the form is traditional, the content isn't. It's basically about two women—one black and one white—fighting over a white guy. What happens next?

Spoiler alert: everyone dies. The black woman kills the white woman and then the white guy kills the black woman and then the white guy kills himself. And all for love.

And wealth. And you know how love and wealth turn people crazy.

Thanks, Countee Cullen, for reminding us that controversy can be hidden inside of the most straight-laced of packages.

Chew on This:

Want to see Cullen's mastery of form in action? Check out his major poem, "Yet Do I Marvel."

Everyone likes to think that Langston Hughes was the Harlem Renaissance poet with the best sense of rhythm. But we think Cullen wasn't too bad, either. Check out our sound check of "Yet Do I Marvel" for more on Cullen's mad metrical skills.