Almost always listed among the greatest poems to come out of the Harlem Renaissance and very often singled out as the ultimate achievement of that cultural efflorescence, Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” was originally published in Survey Magazine on March 1, 1925. A few months later, “Heritage” enjoyed what would become the first of many republications in the magazine New Negro. After these two influential journals, the poem would be published in Cullen’s first collection, Color (1925), in which “Heritage” joined such other landmark poems as “Yet Do I Marvel” and “Incident.” Ever since its reappearance in the second edition of James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1931, it has become one of the most anthologized poems not just of the Harlem Renaissance, but of the rich history of African-American literature.
The poem begins with the difficult question "What is Africa to me?" The speaker is an African-American man who has only heard stories about the home continent of his ancestors in books. He has never experienced the richness of Africa, but he can feel it in his blood. This latent desire is evident in the way he describes this unfamiliar land with passionate detail: "Copper sun or scarlet sea, / Jungle star or jungle track." He goes on to describe how his strong natural passions, which would have flourished in the freedom of his ancestral home, are trapped and constrained in white-dominated American society, where uninhibited self-expression is frowned upon as vulgar: "With the dark blood dammed within / Like great pulsing tides of wine / That, I fear, must burst the fine / Channels of the chafing net / Where they surge and foam and fret." From the historical and geographical distance, he feels the temptation to see Africa as little more than "A book one thumbs / Listlessly, till slumber comes." Despite this proclamation, the narrator seems to have a vivid, idealized picture of Africa in his mind, as seen through his colorful illustrations of its wildlife and inhabitants. The speaker reveals a painful sense of ambivalence toward his African heritage while at the same time offering a strong argument that this heritage cannot but hold major significance for African Americans.
