SOURCE: "Let It Be Allowed," in The Nation and the Athenaeum, Vol. 121, No. 3156, December 30, 1925, pp. 763-64.

In the following review, Deutsch asserts that Color represents the voice of the African-American people and declares Cullen a poet with great potential.

These lyrics [Color] by the youngest of the Negro poets—Countee Cullen is just past his majority—are likely to be considered less as the work of a gifted individual than as the utterance of a gifted, and enslaved, people. And indeed Mr. Cullen's poems are intensely race-conscious. He writes out of the pain of inflamed memories, and with a wilful harking back to the primitive heritage of his own folk. The peculiar flavor which the book gets from the fact that it was written by a colored man is to be had most sharply in the first section, from which the volume takes its title. This tang is...