Cullen, keats, and the privileged liar

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2002 by Goldweber, David E

If his own relationship has been a bad one, it does not keep him from bolstering the faith of others. Love is of tantamount importance to the human soul-the "brightest dream" of all -- and it is the poet's purpose to maintain the sense of love, the ideal of love, for all readers, no matter what the cost. We do not see lying politicians in Cullen; we do not see lying priests, professors, historians, or scientists. It seems that of all our authorities, only poets are privileged to lie to us about life.

There are, of course, limitations to illusions. "For a Magician" shows us one who in life could "explore / Ways others might not guess or see" but in death is "barred behind a door / That has no 'Open Sesame.'" Yet even in their failures, illusions are worth our efforts. In "Bright Bindings," a lover places faith in a beloved, finds her inadequate, but comes away without bitterness or malice. She is like a book he may read:

I have but read a page or two at most,

The most my horror-blinded eyes may read.

I find here but a windy tapering ghost

Where I sought flesh gifted to ache and bleed.

Yet back you go, though counterfeit you be.

I love bright books even when they fail me. (9-14)

And while Cullen does occasionally see illusions and lies as inadequate failures, he does so less and less often as his career progresses, even as he increasingly treats lies and illusions themselves. An increasing percentage of his poems examines illusions, but a decreasing percentage sees any problems in them. In Color (1925), at least three of the forty-five poems (not counting the epitaphs) may be said to deal with illusions (7%), and two of these three ("Magician" and "In Memory") point out limitations. In Copper Sun (1927), at least eight of the fifty-eight poems deal with illusions (14%), and only two of these ("Variations" and "Hunger") point out limitations. In The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), at least ten of the forty-seven deal with illusions (21%), and only one of these ("To an Unknown Poet") points out limitations. Cullen's final volume of poetry, The Medea and Some Poems (1935), continues the trend, with at least six of twenty-seven poems dealing with illusions (22%), and not even one of them pointing out limitations.

To set these themes in context we can go back at least as far as Shakespeare, whose King Lear complains to his daughters (in Act III) that without the pomp and ceremony of nobility, "Man's life is cheap as beast's." Lear knows of the primal bestial aspects of our nature, but he chooses to cover them up.8 A more immediate source, especially for Keats, may be Edmund Burke, whose 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France claims that we require the "pleasing illusions" and "drapery" provided by culture and tradition in order to tame the cold animal within us (171, 245). Yet, interestingly, these themes were not prominent in either Keats's time or Cullen's. A parallel between the English Romantic period and the Harlem Renaissance is a sense not that reality is imperfect and needs covering-up but that a great future is about to begin and that great rewards are waiting before us. The Victorian period-right between Keats and Cullen-was in fact the big period of illusions and lies; it was common practice for journalists, biographers, and common folk alike to hide the indecent and the unseemly.9