A Formalist Critical Approach to "Heritage" by Countee Cullen Countee Cullen College

The speaker in “Heritage” expresses profound emotions regarding an African-American perspective of the motherland. Countee Cullen writes in an irregular meter throughout the piece, consistently using seven syllables in each line. The speaker is effectually declaring the pains of the slave trade to be innocuous to an African American with the poem’s perspective, which is why the speaker is attempting to adopt that perspective.

The poem has a nontraditional structure, but the speaker uses recurrences as an even more important part of the work’s form. The first line is a recurring question throughout the work, and as the context of the poem is more thoroughly elaborated, this question accrues different meanings. In this way, the question is used to drive the poem, each occurrence serving as a sort of checkpoint toward the ultimate goal of understanding the question in depth. In addition to the recurring question, the speaker uses two recurring lines, “From the scenes his fathers loved / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree” (lines 8-9) The speaker also starts several statements with a recurring phrase, “So I lie,” which is first used in the eleventh line. It always precedes an account of the speaker’s state of mind with regard to the...