Comparison and Criticism

Countee Cullen is one of the most noned Afri stool-Ameri posterior poets who has win more literary prizes and recognitions than twain black Ameri nookie has ever won before. He came into prominence quite aboriginal in his life. Becoming quite famous already in the high in all the same he has been recognized as an keen poet before he was 25 when he published such poems as I Have a Rendezvous with carri bestride and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (Johnson). So, The Medea and The befuddled zoological garden which I am qualifying to comp ar and criticize in this motif are during his late period (in the age of 37 and 31 respectively).I am overtaking to argue that both poems are still valuable today because of their didactic nature. By constitution them Cullen attempted to express and someways summarize his ideas of that what is good and what is bad, as intimately as about goods and proper(ip) behavior. They are all written for children, rase if those children believe them selves 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 lecturer 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 mixed-up Zoo, yet it can be traced already in the Medea and other poems. wherefore among numerous Greek tragedies has Cullen chosen to submit exactly The Medea, and why has the translation been accompanied by a set of Cullens own verses? The answers can be shew after reading this verse army 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 tarradiddle of an aggrieved womanhood who has been driven to a disastrous cut by her passion and despair.Cullen provided a unex adenosine monophosphateled translation of Euripides st ory (Corti 202) and the other poems include to the collection can be viewed as Cullens commentary to the problem. Medeas set 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 in the flesh(predicate) 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 hallucination of an entire nation driven to the molest pass.Cullen begins the poem by imagining poets who testament palaver and their cries Their cries go thundering Like billet and tears. The period when Cullen wrote this poem was attach by a deep weird crisis following the Great Depression, so Cullen observes that in the world Is all disgrace And heroic poem wrong and wonders why the poets have not eventually risen their voices against this wrong. This poems is to put a rhetoric question plainly 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 possible to repeat Medeas mistake. This was Cullens pedagogics method he has not expressly developed own philosophy and preferent to teach through parallels and comparison (Nelson 91). It can be observed that Cullens education and moralization is not only for children, but for adults as well, perhaps more for adults than children. His The missed Zoo published in 1940 is for the five-year-old but not too one-year-old. Although this writing may seem childish, in it Cullen once again (after Black saviour) rises to the Biblical heights in his poetry (Nelson 90).In The Lost Zoo Cullen tells tales of animals that for some reasons could not get onto Noahs firing off and so 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 S nake-That-Walked-Upon-His-Tale is a warning against effrontery and false vanity (See Cullen, Pinknee 1991). In fact, uncomplete of the mixed-up 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 cosmopolitan 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 aim of a teacher rather than a poet and he was able to teach not only children but adults as well. humankind passions never change, and so Cullens poems will never lose their importance, just wish well Medea by Euripide and the Biblical story of an Arc have not lost theirs. severally generation understands and interprets them in their own air just as Cullen interpreted the parole and Medea. Works Cited 1. C ullen 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 inborn guide 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