SOURCE: "Singers of New Songs," in Opportunity, Vol. 4, No. 41, May, 1926, pp. 162-64.

In the following excerpt, Kerlin maintains that Cullen's poems in Color contain particular insights and wisdom that are absent from the works of Caucasian poets.

In 1923 a Negro student in New York University won second place among the seven hundred undergraduates of American colleges who competed for the Witter Bynner prize in poetry. The next year he was still second, and in 1925 he was first. This was Countee Cullen, aged 23. On the publication of "The Ballad of the Brown Girl" I wrote, in The Southern Workman, that it placed Mr. Cullen by the side of the best modern masters of the ballad—Morris, Rossetti, and any others that may be named. Of course it is imitative—all modern ballads are, and are successful just in degree as they are imitative of the old folk ballads. But...