The Black Christ, & other poems by Countee Cullen
Encovragements, for such as shall have intention to bee vnder-takers in the new…. is a poetry collection written in the early 20th century, in the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. It interweaves intimate lyric pieces with a major narrative poem, uniting themes of love, doubt, mortality, and Black identity under Jim Crow. The likely topic is a moral and spiritual reckoning with racism and suffering, expressed through art and Christian symbolism. The
book ranges from concise meditations on desire, pride, despair, and endurance to a long narrative centerpiece about a Southern Black family confronting racial terror. An elder brother narrates his mother’s unshakable faith and his younger brother’s proud temper; after the younger man defends a white woman’s dignity and strikes a racist aggressor, a mob hunts him down and lynches him. The narrator plunges into blasphemy and grief, until a miracle: the slain brother reappears transfigured as a Christ figure, the lynching tree becomes the Cross, and sorrow turns into renewed faith. Around this passion story, other poems praise and probe love, face death without illusion, honor Black history and kingship, and insist that poetry answer both universal human feeling and the particular claims of race. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.html.images | 199 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.epub3.images | 1.9 MB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.epub.images | 1.9 MB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.epub.noimages | 219 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.kf8.images | 2.0 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.kindle.images | 2.0 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77442.txt.utf-8 | 95 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77442/pg77442-h.zip | 1.8 MB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Cullen, Countee, 1903-1946 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Cullen, Charles, 1888-1939 |
| LoC No. | 29024220 |
| Title | The Black Christ, & other poems |
| Alternate Title | The Black Christ, and other poems |
| Edition | First edition |
| Original Publication | New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1929. |
| Credits | Sean/IB@DP, Terry Jeffress, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | African Americans -- Poetry |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77442 |
| Release Date | Dec 11, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 302 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |