Countee Cullen protest poetry

Poet’s Style
Countee Cullen was an imaginative lyric poet who wrote sonnet
poetry in the theme of inequality and cultural differences. His
lyricism was quite memorable and he would always use imagery
to help him get his point across. In his early work, the poems
embraced both cultures as he believed that he could minimize
the gap between the black and white people and their cultures.
Cullen's model poet was John Keats who was an English
romantic poet. He was brought up in a black culture and stayed
close to his heritage and roots but he went to school in a white
neighborhood which is visible in his work. He learned the
traditional poetry forms at his school when he was brought up
so that is why he gets inspiration from English Romantic style
poems. Unlike other Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston
Hughes, Cullen was not able to write about the lives and
treatment of blacks like others did as he lacked the personal
experience of these events. Cullen started to address the racial
injustice that was occurring in America through his poems. 'A
Brown Girl Dead' and 'Incident' are both examples of this.
Countee Cullen used traditional English poem forms to express
the problems Negros were facing in society.