More Readings: Towards an Open Poetics in Keats — Countee Cullen, Mae Cowdery, Galway Kinnell, Robert Browning

Abstract

‘… maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.’ This line near the end of Galway Kinnell’s poem ‘Oatmeal,’ about the poet’s having breakfasted with his imaginary friend John Keats, catches a change — a complication — in the most interesting rereadings of Keats among twentieth-century poets. The inadequacy of the notion of the sublime is that it stands in for ‘the divine’ and for a version of ‘Keats’ sans body and social self and even poetics. Take, for example, Countee Cullen’s quatrain from the 1920s, ‘For John Keats, Apostle of Beauty’:

Not writ in water, nor in mist, Sweet lyric throat, thy name;

Thy singing lips that cold death kissed Have seared his own with flame.