Countee Cullen and Keats’s ‘Vale of Soul-Making” Ronatp PriMEAU Is The Anxtety of Influence Harold Bloom suggests that “poetic hustory” 1s “indistinguishable from poetic fluence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” By “misreading,” Bloom means not “mis-taking” but rather what he calls “clinamen,” something more akin to what Lucretius meant by a “swerve of the atoms so as to make changes possible in the umiverse A poet swerves away from hus precursor, by so reading his precursor’s poem as to execute a cliamen m relation to it.”? I am of course oversimplifying Bloom’s detailed discussion, in order to emphasize his theory of poetry as the product of the anxiety of influence, for it provides a way to re- examine the much-discussed yet little-understood anxieties in Countee Cullen’s reading of Keats Almost without exception, commentators 1 (New York, 1973), pp 5, 14 Bloom warns “My concern 1s only with strong poets, mayor figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death Weaker talents ideahize, figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves, But nothing 1s got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the im- mense anxieties of mdebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?” (p 5) Recently he has expanded on these views in A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975) See also Walter Jackson Bate’s discussion of the poet’s “accumulating anxiety” over the weight of past accomplishment (The Burden of the Past and the English Poet [Cambridge, Mass, 1970]) Bate’s “late- comer” is very lke Bloom's heroic “ephebe” who seeks “to rally everything that remains” But whereas Bloom sees the anxiety as a falling away, a creative “sorrow” unable to match the greatness of the precursor, Bate ho'ds out hope for the artist's “readiness” to turn to a past that might become “truly active and lberating without also becoming imtumidating” (p 131) Complex interactions between Cullen and Keats are often a puzzle precisely because they describe an influence that 1s at once Uberatmg and inumudaung 2B74 PLL Ronatp Primzau on Cullen cite Keats as his chief “poetic model.” ? While the simi- larities in structure, imagery, and theme are unmustakable, critics have stressed overt links evidenced in direct allusions and have, at the same ume, neglected even more crucial (though more subtle) thematic connecuons Cullen’s attempts at once to grow through identification with Keats and to free himself from such influences in the very process of assimilating them exemplify many of the tensions in his career. Cullen was attracted to (indeed, almost obsessed by) Keats's repeated and even mitualized insistence that pleasure and pain are always bound up in each other in the sensuous complexity of felt existence. While the suffering of the artst has become almost a cliché in literary history, the creative dimensions of pain and un- certainty—what Keats called the “Vale of Soul-Making”—above all else drew Cullen to the distant poet with whom he had Little else in common. The well-known remarks in Keats's letters suggest a significant parallel: Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely 1s the Heart a Hornbook, It 1s the Mind’s Bible, it 1s the Mind’s experi- ence, it 1s the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks 10s 2 Cullen's affinities with Keats were widely recognized but litte studied in his own me, A reviewer's remark about the “sensuous richness of phrase” and the “death- shadowed joy” reminiscent of Keats are typical (Root E Merrill, “Keats in Labra- dor,” Opportunity 5 (September, 1927] 270-71). During the height of the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties Cullen told Arna Bontemps that “John Keats was his god and Edna St Vincent Millay his goddess” (“The Awakening A Memour,” in The Harlem Renassance Remembered ed Bontemps [New York, 1972], p 18). Although Cullen always saw Keats as a liberating force in his own poetry, his later biographers and critics have found the influence restricung George E Kent's obser- vation that Cullen suffers “by placing himself within the shadow of Keats” aptly summarizes what has become the accepted critical opinion about 2 less than happy mfluence on a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance See “Patterns of the Harlem Renaissance,” Harlem Renatssance Remembered, pp 27-50 Kent’s suggestion that “Cullen’s cultivated speaker in his poems seems to provide too little variation in modulations for the situations he describes” has become an accepted maxim But this appraisal overlooks some of the thematic and stylistic intensity that Cullen often achieved by reshaping his “influences” as he brought them into contact with his own experiences, Cullen’s gravitauon toward Keats's emphasis on the bittersweet com- plexity of human expenence should be neither surprising nor underestumated Though it 1s only part of the complex influences on Cullen waiting to be studied, his reading of Keats deserves closer exammation than it has so far rece:ved.Cullen and Keats's “Vale of Soul-Making” PLL 75 identity—As various as the Lives of Men are—so various become their soul.* The emphasis that Cullen gives to the creativity inherent in bit- tersweet experiences 1s paralleled throughout the Afro-American literary tradiuon, Among the key values “that seem frequently to be reflected by Negro folk literature and by outstanding Negro writers,” George E Kent includes “an acceptance of the role of suffering in retaming one’s humanity and in retaining some perspec- tive on the humanity of the oppressor.”* What Cullen found in Keats's poems 1s consistent with, and reinforces, this basic pattern. In a perceptive review and analysis of Cullen’s mayor themes, Bert- ram L Woodruff has suggested that he uses the five “anodynes” of “Love, Beauty, Faith in Man, Belief in Christ, and Poetry” in order to “assuage the anguish of living.” Woodruff notes the fact that Cullen, like Keats, seems to feel that “his joys are not at the full unul they are sharpened into pains.” 5 This sharpening of sensi- uvity unul the full range of human experience 1s forged into a grid of pleasure-pain is at the center of Cullen’s own experience as well as the chief stmulus attracting him to Keats From his own experi- ences, Cullen fuses joys and difficulties to create what Keats called “the sweetness of the pain” * Ironically, poems in which Cullen refers directly to Keats display far less of the intensity he achieves in his other more subtle treat- ments of the same material. In “For John Keats” he accomplishes lntle more than an echo of the epitaph on Keats’s grave in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery “Not wnit in water, nor in must, / Sweet lyric throat, thy name; / Thy singing lips that cold death kissed / Have seared his own with flame.”7 Although the imagery reflects ele- mental human quests, the patterns he achieves are neither orginal nor particularly striking Sumilarly, “To Endymion” expresses “the 2Tbe Letters of Jobn Keats, ed Hyder E Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 2 102-3 **Ethnic Impact on American Literature (Reflecuons on 2 Course),” in Black Vosces, ed Abraham Chapman (New York, 1968), pp 691-97 5The Poetic Philosophy of Countee Cullen,” Phylon 1 (1949) 213-23 Poetical Works, ed H W_ Garrod, 2d ed (London, 1958), quotauons from Keats's poems are from this edition and are cited by title and page im my text The reference 1s found m Keats's poem to Fanny Brawne, “What can I do to drive away?” (pp 398-99). ‘On These I Stand (New York, 1947). The work 1s Cullen’s own selecuon of material from Color, Copper Sun, The Black Christ, and the Medea (and other works), Most of the poems I shall refer to are from Color, published in 1927, Here- afver I shall cite by ttle and page the parts of poems quoted from On These I Stand.76 PLL RoNnALD PRiMEAU bright immortal lie / Time gives to those detractors of your name” (71) ma series of Keatsian allusions that are for the most part too explicit. “Your star 1s steadfast now” suggests “Bnght star _.,” and “Long shall she stammer forth a broken note” echoes Keats’s wish in hus Endyzmon that he might “stammer where old Chaucer us’d to sing” Other examples, though this one suffices, remforce the critical opinion that Cullen was more hurt than helped by this encounter with Keats. One other famous and directly allusive lyric—“To John Keats, Poet at Spring Time”—1s more lyrical and somewhat more intense. In his version of the Adonais myth, Cullen attempts to merge life and death, pain and joy through the transformmg and berating energies of beauty, specifically of music. As the imagery focuses on the unavoidable difficulues of passing ume Spring beats Her tocsin call to those who love her, And lo! the dogwood petals cover Her breast with drifts of snow {41] the speaker idenufies with nature, beauty, and the poet And while my head 1s earthward bowed To read new life sprung from your shroud, Folks seeing me must think it strange That merely spring should so derange My mind They do not know that you, John Keats, keep revel with me, too [42] The scene Cullen creates 1s again built on qualified assertions typi- cal im Keats’s odes The season 1s a spring that “never was,” a time that “the lyric ghost” of Keats heightens beyond its own capacities. In fact “Spring never was so fair and dear / As Beauty makes her seem this year” (41, italics mine) Poetic “Beauty” thus awakens in the speaker a “pulsing” power that blends the music of the leaves, the harp, and his poetic song The intensity 1s strikingly Keatstan as through the dust fingers push “The Vision Splendid to a birth.” The dead poet’s cry (his poem) continues in “bud and blossom,” and “John Keats still writes poetry.” Bewilderment in “Folks seeing me” (readers) and references to the “merely spring” is thereforeCullen and Keats's “Vale of Soul-Making” PLL 77 both sronic and quite literal. One could go on citing countless such examples of Cullen’s at- traction to Keats as a significant poetic precursor Their common ground 1s always their persistent and almost obsessive drive to render poetically the realities of bittersweet human experience Most often in direct allusions, mvocations bordering on idolatry, and blatant parallels, Cullen fails to overcome an influence that truly became a burden But Cullen also read Keats creatively, and m poems where he 1s able to establish a distance between his precursor and his own experiences, the influence 1s stronger even where 1t 1s least percepuble Through a process of closure, Cullen read more into Keats than 1s generally assumed to be there Drawing upon his own needs and ambitions, Cullen made his best use of Keats and at the same time freed himself from his precursor by placing his own experiences in a position of prominence Beyond such observable parallels, what has usually been over- looked in discussions of Cullen’s indebtedness to Keats 1s his own distinctive reworking of themes and techniques In his more subtle modifications of Keats, Cullen selected, rearranged, and reshaped poetic materials by impressing his own experiences on his responses to what he read The poems most successfully forged from his reading communicate a sense of authentic existence Iromcally, then, his reading of Keats 1s most influential not in what 1s some- tumes called his “non-racial” verse but rather in poetry he created out of his most intensely personal experiences as a black man and black poet. Parallels in the works of the two distant poets speak also to many of the controversies surrounding the influence of white poets on the black art of the Harlem Renaissance Cullen’s ability to render his own experience in poems was to some extent limited by his choice of culturally white aesthetic forms The oft-repeated argument that Cullen and others in the Harlem Renaissance often wrote for white audiences and with white standards m mind 1s well known ® But the truths in this basic assumption should not be used to dismiss Cullen’s achievements in his own time Nor should we overlook the See for example Ann Colley's summary of the view that “Cullen sees and expresses himself in terms of the white experience—not the Black” and that he thereby “loses sense of his blackness when he writes poems using forms such as the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and rime royal” (“Don L Lee's ‘But He Was Cool or He even Stopped for Green Lights’ An Example of the New Black Aesthetic,” Concernmg Poetry 4 (Fall, 1971] 20-27)78 PLL Ronatp PriMeau subtle influences on poems in which he does convey his experiences authentically. Everything that attracted Cullen to Keats (or to any- one else) depended 1n large part on his ability to come to grips with his own experience. In short, Cullen’s personal experiences as a black man and poet within a given historical reference helped to shape his responses to Keats in distunctve ways and prompted him at the same time to transform what he found in his reading into the creation of his own poems. In what 1s usually considered his “racial” poetry, Cullen’s absorption of Keats 1s more pervasive and liberating than in the obviously allusive and formal elegies. In “The Shroud of Color” the speaker describes “being dark” in terms simular to the intensity of contraries central to Keats's odes: There 1s a hurt In all the simple joys which to a child Are sweet, they are contaminate, defiled By truths of wrongs the childish vision fails To see, too great a cost this birth entails {16} Grappling with tensions and contradictions, the speaker embodies both the intensity of Keats’s “burst joy’s grape” in “Ode on Melan- choly” (220) and the hopelessness characteristic of Keats’s poems and letters to Fanny Brawne: I strangle in this yoke drawn tghter than The worth of bearing it, just to be man. Tam not brave enough to pay the price In full, I lack the strength to sacrifice.® (16) Cullen’s poem may be likened to a long Keatsian dream-vision in which the speaker explores elemental feelings and attempts to place all the world’s sufferings and joys together in epic panorama: All was struggle, gasping breath, and fight. A blind worm here dug tunnels to the hght, *On 13 September 1819 Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne “Knowing well that my lufe must be passed in faugue and trouble, I have been endeavoring to wean myself from you ... 1 am a coward, I cannot bear the pain of being happy 1 1s out of the question I must admut no thought of ” (Letters, 2 160). Several of Keats's let- ters to Fanny Brawne shed light on the complexity of the parallels between Cullen and Keats. See below and 2 312-13.Cullen and Keats's “Vale of Soul-Making” PLL 79 And there a seed, racked with heroic pain, Thrust eager tentacles to sun and rain. 18] The speaker languishes with “groans / From tangled flesh and inter- locked bones,” lamenting especially the pain of being black in a world serving those “whose flesh 1s fair.” Yet as a “strange wild music smote / A chord long impotent” in his being, the pattern of sorrow reverses itself in what James Baldwin terms “celebration of what is constant” 1° The speaker fights his way through, and in the process affirms difficulty itself by expressing the hope such endur- ance brings for creative growth And somehow it was borne upon my brain How being dark, and hving through the pain Of 1t, 1s courage more than angels have ... The cries of all dark people near or far Were billowed over me, a mighty surge Of suffering in which my puny grief must merge And lose itself. [22] Structurally and thematically Cullen creates striking parallels with what he found regularly in Keats. But his subyect 1s clearly the experience which 1s both personal and collective as it 1s embodied in the Afro-American oral tradinon which Cullen knew well His con- clusion 1s therefore experientially authenuc and shaped into poenc conflicts very like what he found in Keats’s odes. The Fire Next Tre (New York, 1963), p 124 Baldwin describes a range of experiences sumi'ar to what Cullen captured in hus poems In hus well known analysis of racism as an outgrowth of insecurity, he captures the psyche of white America as xt 1s amprisoned in its own self-hare Opposed to this pervasive collapse of even love uself into its “infantile American sense of being made happy,” he contrasts love in ms “universal sense of quest and daring and growth” (p 128) Because it freed rtself from much of the decay afflicung white America, Baldwin's own culture preserved for hum “a joy and capacity for facing disaster” and “‘an sronic tenacity” that white people find difficult even to understand He concludes, in short, that man must forego the self-deception of “the sanctification of power” and learn instead to “cele~ brate what 1s constant ” Baldwin’s analysis reflects Cullen's almost obsessive belief that an experience demands what in “Heritage” he calls “precedent of pain to guide it” Cullen’s speakers repeatedly express Baldwin's view that “people who cannot suffer can never grow up” (p 132).80 PLL Ronatp Primeau Rught glad I was to stoop to what I once had spurned, Glad even unto tears, I laughed aloud, I turned Upon my back, and though the tears for joy would run, My sight was clear, I looked and saw the rising sun {“The Shroud of Color,” 23] Cullen often repeats this basic pattern of Keats’s odes a speaker in pursuit of a seemingly unrealizable goal modifies his quest to accept, and in the process to reaffirm and to remake what 1s difficult but realizable in day to day human experience His affirmation brings pleasure and pain as the speaker trades escape for a difficult, mevit- able, yet imaginative involvement in human existence in ume." In his extended series of “Epitaphs” Cullen pursues in shorter, almost chpped form his preoccupation with dreams (“I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth” [31]), his theme of affirmation of process as an answer to time’s destructive powers (“This lovely flower fell to seed,” but “She held it as her dying creed / That she would grow again” [32]), and his compulsion toward the inter- relatedness of joy and sorrow “Murth was a crown upon his head, / Pride kept his twisted ips apart / In jest, to hide a heart that bled” (37) Although these short lyrics are among Cullen’s best-known works, they are seldom read alongside others in which he alludes directly to Keats When seen together, Keats’s influence and Cullen’s working with the Afro-American poeuc tradition become more complex than either alone is usually considered In “If You Should Go” the speaker expresses the view that might 1s needed to define the day, he then extends this theme to the fading of a dream A dream, When done, should leave no trace That it has lived, except a gleam Across the dreamer’s face (38) In “She of the Dancing Feet Sings,” the speaker, much like the dreamers in Keats’s odes, reyects perfection as an unrealizable and ultumately inhuman state: And how would I thrive in a perfect place 41See David Perkins, Quest for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), for a fuller discussion of Keats's affirmation of process in the odes especiallyCullen and Keats's “Vale of Soul-Making” PLL 81 Where dancing would be sin, ‘With not a man to love my face, Nor an arm to hold me in? 139] thus recalling the “Ode to a Nighungale” “But here there 1s no light” (208) “The Wise” also repeats the Keatsian pattern of withdrawal from and then reentry into painful complexity “Dead men alone bear frost and ran / On throbless heart and heatless bran, / And feel no sur of joy or pain” (40) The poem 1s a death- wish that 1s undercut nonetheless by Cullen’s sromc juxtaposition of contrary states of love and hate, heat and cold, growth and death The speaker’s conclusion is thus appropriately ambiguous in its partially uronic longing to freeze the flux of tme and to stop painful initiation mto the pamful world of process “Strange, men should flee ther company, / Or think me strange who long to be / Wrapped in their cool immunity” (40) Curiously, Cullen places “To John Keats” between “The Wise” and “Requiescam” in ar- ranging the selections in On These I Stand The three poems com- plement each other by working and reworking the theme of death as a bittersweet end to both joy and pain, taken together, the three poems describe death as a complex of relief and loss Whereas “To John Keats” is a hopeful “Adonais” and “The Wise” an expression of unresolved conflict, “Requiescam” 1s a bitter wish that “my life’s cold sun were setting / To rise for me no more” (43). In many conventional sonnets Cullen rewrote Keats by transform- ing the themes and techniques he found in the older poet ito the terms of his own experience Typically in the sonnets “a crucifix” displaces Keats’s imagery of autumn as “the noblest way fraught with too much pain” (149) Cullen also links “what was said before” with what will be said “countless centuries from now again” when a poet “warped with bitterness and pain” will “brew” his poems “hoping to salve his sore” (153). Again in this one m a series of unutled sonnets, a Keatsian “throbbmg” unifies his obsession with the intermingling of pain and pleasure in the etermzing creativity of poetry In emphasizing anguish and disdain in several poems Cul- len echoes the despair that dominates in Keats’s “Isabella” In “Son- net Dialogue” the speaker's realization that “the worm shall tread the hon down” (155) suggests the “wormy circumstance” in “Isa- bella.” Many of Cullen’s most conventional lyrics also take on added82 PLL RonaLp Primeau dimensions when read as further orchestrations of his persistent blending of joy and suffering. His lays of the unrequited lover again often resemble the desperateness of Keats’s poems to Fanny Brawne !* “The Love Tree” relates a tale of “pale lovers chancing here” who pluck and eat, and through their veins a sweet And languid ardor play, their pulses beat An unimagined tune, their shy lips meet And part, and bliss repeat again, [59] Yet this growth in love reveals another variation on a basic Keatsian theme “’Twas break of heart that made the Love Tree grow.” Further examples of Cullen’s attraction to Keats’s themes muluply. In “Love’s Way,” the cup is “shared down to the last sweet dregs” (62). And in “Protest,” the speaker once more affirms process in his acceptance of human existence as a “time to live, to love, bear pain and smile” (64). In “More Than a Fool’s Song” Cullen unobtrusively builds a catalog of opposites. Court pleasure in the halls of grief, .- The World's a curious nddle thrown ‘Water-wise from heavens’s cup, The souls we think are hurthng down Perhaps are chmbing up {67} Just as “The Foolish Heart” “needs a grave / To prove to it that it 1s dead,” the speaker of “Bright Bindings” secks “flesh gifted to ache and bleed” (96). In “After a Visit,” Cullen describes man’s fall from grace as a recoiling from pain and a destructive with- drawal from involvement in the experiential that can be remedied only by reentry into a complex and painful regenerative process: I had known joy and sorrow I had surely known, But out of neither any piercing note was blown. Fnends had been land and surely friends had fruitless been, “1 wish to believe in ammortality—I wish to live with you forever... 1 am strong enough to walk over—but I dare not. I shall feel so much pain in parung with you again My dearest love, I am afraid to see you, I am strong, but not strong enough to see you": Letters, 2.293Cullen and Keats's “Vale of Soul-Making” PLL 83 But long ago my heart was closed, panelled within. (141) Again the Keatsian pattern of resolution closes the poem And shame of my apostasy was like a coal That reached my tongue and heart and far off frigid soul, Melting myself into myself, making me weep Regeneration’s burning tears, precluding sleep [142] Cullen’s best-known works, such as “Heritage,” “From the Dark Tower,” and “The Black Christ,” are also glossed sigmficantly by an understanding of his attracuon to, and reshaping of, Keatsian themes and techniques The iromes that Cullen 1s able to sustain regularly in his major works are analogous to what Kenneth Burke has now classically referred to as “symbolic acnon” in Keats’s odes Reading “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as “a viaticum that leads, by a series of transformations, into the oracle ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’” Burke established inseparable links between stylistic pat- tern and a thematic “abolishing of romanticism through roman- ticism ” This fusion of structure and theme results m what Walter Jackson Bate has called “that process of symbolic debate in which a dominant symbol or concept, after being postulated at the start, becomes the motif in a counterpomt of withdrawal, qualifications, and parual return.” ”* Cullen found this poetic structure best able to reflect his own experiences, and he drew upon this fusion of experiential and poetic structure in order to express the tensions in his own life Keats’s often quoted discussion of the “Vale of Soul-Making” summarizes his most important influences on Cullen’s style and thought Suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning it enjoys itself—but there comes a cold wind, a hot sun—it cannot escape it, 1t cannot destroy its annoy- ances—they are as native to the world as itself no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his nature— I say ‘Soul-Making’ Soul as distun- guished from an Intelligence—There may be Intelligences or sparks of the divinity in milkons—but they are not 34 Burke, “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats.” in A Granzmar of Motwes (New York, 1945), pp. 447-63, Bate, Jobn Keats (New York, 1963), p. 619.84 PLL Ronatp PrimEau Souls ull they acquire identities, ull each one is person- ally stself.4 Cullen repeatedly worked such themes and structures directly into his shorter poems and then reworked them carefully ito his major works so as to adjust them to his developing needs Durect parallels can be seen once again in “Two Thoughts of Death ” While I hang poised between the dead And quick, into omniscience fanned, My mind shall glow with one rich spark Before it ends in endless dark And as my day throbs into dusk, This heart the world has made to bleed, While all its red stream deathward flows, Shall comprehend just why the seed Must agonize to be the rose (61] In his reading of Keats, Cullen was at his best able to transform the stylistic patterns he found by merging them with the oral and folk traditions that were a part of his own experience The resultant merging of theme and structure accounts for both the productive tensions and the puzzling ambiguities and controversies created by lus mayor works In writing on “the symbolic texture” of Cullen’s “self-critical enquiry mto the nature and function of the African idyll mm the Black American’s consciousness,” Lloyd W Brown traces the “mythic nature” of his “sentumental fantasies about cul- tural roots”*® Just as the speakers of Keats’s odes dream unreal dreams that reflect real tensions inherent m everyday human prob- lems, so also—following Brown’s reading—‘“Heritage” embodies amages that are “unreal” and yet “reflect a very real psychological need.” For the speaker in “Heritage,” careful rendermg of fantasy murrors tensions in his thinking and expresses what Brown calls his “desire to establish a Black frame of reference” * Keats’s poems are, of course, not the only place Cullen would find such preoccupa- tions. But in this context, his response to Keatsian imagery and poetic form brought him closer to, rather than farther from, an 4 Letters, 2 102-3. 15“The Expatriate Consciousness in Black American Literature,” Studses sn Black Literature 3 (1972). 9-12 48 Ibid, p. 11.Cullen and Keats's “Vale of Soul-Making” PLL 85 understanding of his own experience and a developing poetic form in which to express the paradoxes of that experience. Again in Brown’s view, “What 1s paramount are the psycho-exstenual needs which these myths protect, and which the writers themselves ana- lyze in serious and self-conscious terms ” 17 “Heritage,” Cullen’s most famous poem, needs no commentary here In the long soliloquy the speaker captures the contraries and poised energy typical of the concentrated expression and expansive paradox in Keats's odes So I le, whose fount of pride, Dear distress, and joy allied, In my somber flesh and skin, 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 [24-25] Here the parallels to Keats’s themes (distress and joy allied), imagery (“dammed within”), and fusion of theme and structure (“burst the fine channels”) are both overt and sufficiently blended into Cullen’s own experience as he transforms his influences into his own state- ments The result 1s a more subtle and effective influence that often 1s ignored Cullen’s own experience merges with the Keatsian influence again in his subtle attack on Christianity in “Heritage” Although he knew little about either African or Eastern cultures, he was certain that a white Christ offered the black man at best a fragmented symbol of his own experience *® Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black, Ibid, p 16 48Emphasizing this conceptualizing, Nicholas Canaday, Jr, has perceptively com- mented on Cullen's theme—in “Heritage"—“that the part of Christianity which 1s merely the result of Western cu'ture 1s an excrescence” Canaday, too, sees the sigmificance of Cullen’s use of Keatsian “symbolic action ” “Cullen knew no more about the real Africa than did Keats about the real Provencal Cullen has translated the myth into poetry in order to embody concretely, not to deny, the power of that myth” (“Mayor themes in the Poetry of Countee Cullen,” Harlem Renarssance Remembered, pp 103-25)86 PLL Ronatp Primeau Thinlang then it would not lack Precedent of pain to guide it. (27] Again Cullen’s emphasis on the creative dimensions of pain and the abibty to identify with suffering 1s obvious And once more his magnetic pull toward the conceptual influenced his choice of the poetic vehicle in which to express the guidance of precedent. The full range and complexity of influences on Cullen’s career await fuller explorauon His indebtedness to the spirituals, to shouts and work songs, to Dunbar (surely underestimated during the Renaissance), and to mimor poets of Cullen’s own time such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Frank Horne, and Helene Johnson needs extensive examination and evaluation ** Recognition of the complex- ity of Cullen’s response to Keats indicates some of the directions further study might take. Although he often speaks from behind DuBors’s “veil” and reflects the tension of experiences within the double life, Cullen tends more toward the conceptual and the philo- sophical rather than the concrete dramatic rhythms dominant in the oral tradition Enmeshed in controversy most of his career, Cul- len’s own goals and accomplishments within the limitations imposed by his own times are underestimated In 1927 he told an interviewer for The Chicago Bee that mn his works he tried to capture the dis- tnctive experiences of the Negro, “his joys and sorrows, mostly the latter” His obsessive drive to create at least a workable balance between the intellectual and the sensuous, the mythological and the deeply personal further attracted hum to Keats. Cullen’s subyect was always—in a variety of forms and in repeated reworkings—again in his own words, “the heights and depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro.” 7° 2° Revaluations of Cullen need most to focus on his position in the developing Afro-American oral tradition We need to apply more carefully the method sug- gested long ago by LeRoi Jones (Imamu Baraka) in Blues People (New York, 1963) and developed most recently by Stephen Henderson, who makes the “oral traditon, both rural and urban” the “infrastructure” of his Understandmg the New Black Poetry (New York, 1973) Henderson suggests, for example, that the irony of Cul- len’s “To Make a Poet Black” cannot be appreciated unless one can understand “the specific historical debasement of the African psyche in America” (p 12) On paral- Jels between the English Romantics and the minor poets of the Harlem Renaissance, see my “Frank Horne and the Second Echelon Poets of the Harlem Renaissance,” Harlem Renaissance Remembered, pp 247-67 229 December 1927, as quoted by Darwin T Turner in his introduction to the reprint of Color (New York, 1959), pp v-viCopyright © 2002 EBSCO Publishing