"Incident" is a poem by

Countee Cullen Countee Cullen (born Countee LeRoy Porter; May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Childhood Countee LeRoy Porter ...

, describing a black child's exposure to racism from a white child. It was first published in his 1925 poetry collection "Color".

Reception

The

Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation is a United States literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism in the wider culture. It was formed from ''Poetry'' magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthrop ...

says that the poem "throbs with anger", and considers it to be

autobiographical An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life, providing a personal narrative that reflects on the author's experiences, memories, and insights. This genre allows individuals to share thei ...

.Countee Cullen
at the

; retrieved August 16, 2024 The

University of Baltimore The University of Baltimore (UBalt, UB) is a public university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It is part of the University System of Maryland. UBalt consists of four colleges in applied arts and sciences, Robert G. Merrick School of Bu ...

's Baltimore Literary Heritage Project stated that it "paints an ugly—albeit accurate—picture" of early 20th-century Baltimore.Countee Cullen: Baltimore's Brush with the Harlem Renaissance
at the Baltimore Literary Heritage Project; via

archive.org The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applic ...

; archived September 14, 2007; retrieved August 16, 2024

Rita Dove Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as United States Poet Laureate, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have bee ...

has called it "heart-wrenching",A Poet a Day: Rita Dove Reads Countee Cullen
by Theresa Riley; at BillMoyers.com; filmed 2012; posted at BillMoyers.com, June 16, 2020; retrieved August 16, 2024 while Trudier Harris finds it to be "one of ullen's(...) most effective pieces", opining that it "shows that America is not fully American for blacks living on its soil". African American Protest Poetry
by Trudier Harris; at the

National Humanities Center The National Humanities Center (NHC) is an independent institute for advanced study in the humanities located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States. The NHC operates as a privately incorporated nonprofit and is not part of any uni ...

; published no later than November 27, 2010 (earliest revision on

); retrieved August 16, 2024

Analysis

Rachel Blau Duplessis Rachel Blau DuPlessis (born December 14, 1941) is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized. Early life DuPlessis w ...

observes that the poem depicts "the blow of social learning of one’s place in a racial/racist order", and notes that "the central

quatrain A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four Line (poetry), lines. Existing in a variety of forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India ...

proposes the equality of the children in size, demeanor, and in age, indeed, in every way but one", and that the word "whit" not only "means 'particle' or 'iota'", but also "irresistibly suggests both 'white' and 'wit.'"On "Incident"
by

; in ''Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934''; published 2001 by

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

; archived at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

Cary Nelson Cary Nelson (born 1946), is an American professor emeritus of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was president of the American Association of University Professors bet ...

argues that Cullen's preference for traditional and "childlike" forms of poetry means that the word "

nigger In the English language, ''nigger'' is a racial slur directed at black people. Starting in the 1990s, references to ''nigger'' have been increasingly replaced by the euphemistic contraction , notably in cases where ''nigger'' is Use–menti ...

" is a "violation" that is "more disturbing and effective than its appearance in a

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

would be."Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945
by

; p. 23-24; published 1989 by

University of Wisconsin Press The University of Wisconsin Press (sometimes abbreviated as UW Press) is a Non-profit organization, non-profit university press publishing Peer review, peer-reviewed books and journals. It publishes work by scholars from the global academic comm ...

References

{{reflist 1925 poems Works about racism