SOURCE: "Color—A Review," in Opportunity, Vol. 4, No. 37, January, 1926, pp. 14-15.

In the following assessment of Color, Locke proclaims Cullen a rare talent whose verse is firmly rooted in poetic tradition and in the African-American experience.

Ladies and gentlemen! A genius! Posterity will laugh at us if we do not proclaim him now. Color transcends all the limiting qualifications that might be brought forward if it were merely a work of talent. It is a first book, but it would be treasurable if it were the last; it is a work of extreme youth and youthfulness over which the author later may care to write the apology of "juvenilia," but it has already the integration of a distinctive and matured style; it is the work of a Negro poet writing for the most part out of the intimate emotional experience of race, but the adjective is for the...