Comparison and Criticism

Countee Cullen is one of the most famed black poets who has won more literary prizes and recognitions than whatever black Ameri potty has ever won before. He came into prominence quite advance(prenominal) in his life. Becoming quite famous already in the high discipline he has been recognized as an nifty poet before he was 25 when he published such poems as I Have a Rendezvous with behavior and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (Johnson). So, The Medea and The befuddled menagerie which I am sack to compargon and criticize in this cover are during his late period (in the date of 37 and 31 respectively).I am tone ending to argue that two poems are fluid valuable today because of their didactic nature. By piece of writing them Cullen attempted to express and somehow summarize his ideas of that what is good and what is bad, as nearly as about cleans and appropriate behavior. They are all written for children, correct if those children believe themselves to be adults. Since 1934 Cullen taught English and French at the Frederick Douglas Junior High School. He has been offered a position of a reader at the Fisk University in Nashville which he declined. Thus he has chosen a career of a teacher, non a lecturer and scientist.His interest to work with children and writing for children later clearly revealed when he wrote The bewildered Zoo, yet it stillt joint be traced already in the Medea and other poems. why among numerous Greek tragedies has Cullen chosen to represent exactly The Medea, and why has the translation been come with by a set of Cullens own verses? The answers washbowl be instal after reading this numbers line of battle and comparing its themes and motifs to the ones of Euripides. The original myth of Medea, as it has been told by Euripides, is a yarn of an aggrieved womanhood who has been driven to a disastrous course of action by her passion and despair.Cullen provided a new-made translation of Euripides story (Corti 202) a nd the other poems include to the collection can be viewed as Cullens commentary to the problem. Medeas band is reflected in The Magnets in which Cullen writes of The straight, the swift, the debonair who are targets on the thoroughfare. This passage can be viewed as a individual(prenominal) reflection, yet in the light of Scottsboro, Too, Is deserving Its Song, a nonher Cullens poem, it can be interpreted in a broader social context, as a hatful of an entire nation driven to the injure pass.Cullen begins the poem by imagining poets who ordain interpret and their cries Their cries go thundering Like rootage and tears. The period when Cullen wrote this poem was label by a deep ghost deal crisis following the Great Depression, so Cullen observes that in the world Is all disgrace And epical wrong and wonders why the poets have non eventually risen their voices against this wrong. This poems is to put a rhetoric question but not to give an answer. Cullen attempts to make his readers themselves concerned with the moral descent, to awaken their own minds and conscience.Otherwise they are in all likelihood to repeat Medeas mistake. This was Cullens learn method he has not expressly developed own philosophy and favourite(a) to teach through parallels and comparison (Nelson 91). It can be observed that Cullens pedagogy and moralization is not only for children, but for adults as well, perhaps more for adults than children. His The disjointed Zoo published in 1940 is for the juvenility but not too three-year-old. Although this writing may seem childish, in it Cullen once again (after Black deliveryman) rises to the Biblical heights in his poetry (Nelson 90).In The illogical Zoo Cullen tells tales of animals that for some reasons could not get onto Noahs curl then teaching his readers certain life lessons (Silvey 3). Squilililigees story is a warning both against teasing and against excessive susceptibility, while the story of a Snake-That-Walked- Upon-His-Tale is a warning against assumption and false vanity (See Cullen, Pinknee 1991). In fact, uncomplete of the lost animals was fated and each of them could be saved in case they themselves behaved in a proper way. The conduct of the lost animals ruins them because they attempt to be that what they are not. This is a typical mistake of all times.Cullen is a man of his time, yet his verses are of comprehensive everlasting value. They are topical in our days same as in the days of Cullen. When Cullen wrote both Medea and The Lost Zoo he played a economic consumption of a teacher rather than a poet and he was able to teach not only children but adults as well. sympathetic passions never change, and so Cullens poems will never lose their importance, just like Medea by Euripide and the Biblical story of an Arc have not lost theirs. to each one generation understands and interprets them in their own room just as Cullen interpreted the tidings and Medea. Works Cited 1. Culle n Countee. The Medea and Some Poems.New York Harper & Bros. , 1935 2. Cullen, Countee Pinknee, Brian J. The Lost Zoo. Silver Burdett Pr. , 1991 3. Corti, Lillian. The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children. Greenwood Press, 1998 4. Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath. African American authors, 1745-1945. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000 5. Silvey, Anita. The essential pass on to childrens books and their creators, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002 6. Johnson, Clifton H. About Countee Cullens Life and Career. 27 may 2009 http//www. english. illinois. edu/MAPS/poets/a_f/cullen/life. htm 7. Countee Cullen 27 May 2009 http//www. harvardsquarelibrary. org/poets/cullen. php