Cullen, keats, and the privileged liar

5 One might say that Cullen, too, blurs the line between lies and truth in the opening stanza of The Ballad of the Brown Girl "Oh, this is the tale the grandams tell / In the land where the grass is blue, / And some there are who say `tis false, / And some that hold it true."

6 There is debate about whether Keats sees some of these fooled lovers as triumphant or defeated. Earl Wasserman's is the most influential 'triumph' view (The Finer Tone, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1953), seeing Porphyro and Madeline achieving fellowship with truth), while Stillinger's is the most influential 'defeat' view (The Hoodwinking of Madeline, Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1971), seeing the lovers as lost in a storm). Most critics see Apollonius as a villain, but for a view sympathetic to Apollonius, see Walter H. Evert's Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965).

7 See especially "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," the opening lines of Endymion, "Where's the Poet? Show him! Show him," and "Bards of passion and of mirth." Most critics share my view, but for an alternate view that sees Keats viewing poetry's untruths as an escapist "thralldom," see Marjorie Levinson's Keats's Life of

Allegory (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988). See also Fall of Hyperion 198-202, where Keats distinguishes between poets who offer a "balm" to the world and dreamers who "vex" the world.

8 See also various sonnets, such as #138: "When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies."

9 The 'revolutionary' temper of the Romantic age is well known; see for example William Hazlitt's 1825 essay compilation The Spirit of the Age or Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" (Book X). The post-World War I sense of modernity and change is also well known; it sometimes includes disillusionment and a `lost generation' emotional upheaval. Most relevant to Cullen is the idea of the `New Negro' (as expounded by Alain Locke in his 1925 anthology of that name) who, unlike lowly or clownish `old negroes,' is confident, self-possessed, and able to succeed in his own right. For a discussion of Victorian propriety see Walter E. Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957), especially the sections on Enthusiasm and Hypocrisy.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Houston A., Jr. A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams. Detroit: Broadside, 1974.

Baker, Jeffrey. John Keats and Symbolism. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien. Baltimore: Penguin, 1968.

Crimeau, Ronald. "Countee Cullen and Keats's `Vale of Soul-Making."' Papers on Language and Literature 12.1 (Winter 1976): 73-86.

Cullen, Countee. The Ballad of the Brown Girl. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.

----. The Black Christ and Other Poems. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929.

----. Color. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925.

----. Copper Sun. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.

----. The Medea and Some Poems. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935. Early, Gerald. Introduction to My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen. New York: Doubleday, 1991.