Longer Views: Extended Essays
But Blackmur’s “Notes on a Text of Hart Crane,” an essay which, despite its criticism, is probably as responsible as any other for Crane’s endurance, basically takes the same tack and was widely available from the time of its publication in 1935 through Blackmur’s arrival at Princeton in 1940 and his vast popularity as a critic ever since. (It is still available today in Blackmur’s Form and Value in Modern Poetry.) That essay begins:
It is a striking and disheartening fact that the three most ambitious poems of our time should all have failed in similar ways: in composition, in independent objective existence, and in intelligibility of language. The Waste Land, the Cantos, and The Bridge all fail to hang together structurally in the sense that “Prufrock,” “Envoi,” and “Praise for an Urn”—lesser works in every other respect—do hang together.
Today, the general consensus on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound has wholly reversed; since studies of Eliot and Pound by critics like Elizabeth Drew and Hugh Kenner, Blackmur’s pronouncement tinkles like a quaint bell, a bit out of tune, from the past. The consensus on Crane, however, has not. But, as Edelman has argued, we best go back to the early critics of Crane in order to commence whatever rehabilitation we might wish to undertake.
Winters accused Crane of following linguistic impulses, rather than intentionally creating his ideas—of automatic writing, rather than careful articulation of meanings—unaware that all writing (even the most logical and articulate) is, in some sense, automatic. But the fact is, what Winters says of Crane is perfectly true. Where Winters is wrong is in his assumption that there is another, intention-centered, consciousness-bound, teleographical approach to the creation of poetry in particular and writing in general that is, somehow, actually available to the poet/writer other than as a metaphor or as a provisional construct dictated by the political moment. The teleology Winters could not find in Whitman’s pantheism is ultimately not to be had anywhere.
All sentences move toward logic and coherence—or, indeed, toward whatever their final form—by a kind of chance and natural selection. The sentence moves toward other qualities of the poetic in the same manner. Intention, consciousness, and reason are not a triumvirate that impels or creates language. Rather they sit in judgment of the performance after the fact, somewhere between mind and mouth, thought and paper, accepting or rejecting the language offered up; and—when they reject it—they are only able to wait for new language they find more fitting for the tasks to hand. But while intention, consciousness, and reason can halt speech (sometimes), there is some other, ill-understood faculty of mind that fountains up “that virtual train of fires upon jewels” (Mallarmé, translated and quoted by the disapproving Winters) that is poetic language as much as it is analytical prose: It is something associative, rhetorical, dictational—and always almost opaque to analysis. Intention, consciousness, and reason can only make a request of it, humbly and hesitantly—a request to which that faculty may or may not respond, as if it were possessed of an intention wholly apart from ours—or, more accurately, as if it functioned at the behest of other, ill-understood aspects of mind apart from will or intention or anything like them. One can only hear the resonances of a word after it has been uttered, read its associations after it has been written; and, judging such associations and resonances, intention, consciousness, and reason can at best allow language to pass or not to pass. And from what we know of Crane, he was as much at pains to guide his poetic output as any writer in the language. But I also believe that a writer who thinks he or she can do anything else is likely to brutalize, if not stifle, his or her output—likely, at any rate, to restrict it to something less than it might be.
When, in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot made his famous call for “depersonalization” in poetry—
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness through his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, and continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition . . .
—to the extent that the process of the poet is one with the poet’s progress through the sentences which make up her or his poem, I suspect Eliot was referring to the identical process I spoke of above, involving at least the provisional suspension of intention, consciousness, and reason, i.e., personality. Moreover I suspect Winters recognized it as such. And on the strength of that recognition, he condemned the author.
In his book Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text, the late Thomas Yingling cites a passage from Crane’s 1925 essay, “General Aims and Theories,” as expressing the very opposite of what Eliot, above, was calling for. Crane put together these notes for Eugene O’Neill when O’Neill was contemplating writing an introduction to Crane’s first collection, White Buildings: “It seems to me that the poet will accidentally define his times well enough simply by reacting honestly and to the full extent of his sensibilities to the states of passion, experience and rumination that fate forces on him, first hand.”
I think, however, that the notion of an accidental definition, the idea of an honest reaction to the states of passion, experience, and rumination to the full extent of his sensibilities is a poet speaking of, yet again, the identical creative experience in which intention (or whatever produces the “intention” effect), consciousness, and reason must not be employed too early—before there is material for them to accept or reject—and are signs that Crane and Eliot are speaking of the same phenomenon. The difference in how they speak about it has to do with what, as it were, each sees as fueling what I have called that “ill-understood faculty of mind” that first produces language. In 1919, Eliot saw it as literature. In 1925, Crane saw it as passion, experience, and rumination.
To ruminate is, of course, what ruminants do. Its metaphorical extension is not so much thinking, but thinking “over and over”—as the OED reminds us. Repetition is inchoate in the metaphor. If there is a margin for intellection in Crane’s model, it comes under the rubric of “rumination.” And because that model suggests not so much “reading” as “rereading” (as well as the political margins for experience and passion), it is likely to appeal to the modern sensibility more than Eliot’s.
Yingling’s book points up how much of Crane’s “failure” is intricately entailed with the homophobia of his critics—till finally Crane comes to represent more than anything else the most damning case of bad faith among the New Critics, who claimed above all to believe in the separation of the text from the man. But faced with Crane’s homosexuality, as Yingling shows, they simply couldn’t do it. This part of Yingling’s argument one does not in the least begrudge him. Still, his overall thesis would have been stronger if he had been able to historify his discussion, relating (and distinguishing) Crane’s case specifically to (and from) the extraordinarily similar marginalization (and persistence in spite of it) of Poe (1809–1849)—as well as, say, James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), and Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)—this last, one of the passions of Crane’s adolescence. A book of Johnson’s is recorded as part of Crane’s adolescent library—doubtless the 1915 edition with the introduction by Ezra Pound. Alcoholism was a huge factor in all these poets’ lives—and deaths. Perversion—in the form of pedophilia—haunted both the case of Poe and, only a trifle less so, of Thomson and Dawson. Homosexuality was certainly a factor in Johnson’s life—and may or may not have been involved with the others. And in all cases major attempts were launched after their deaths to establish them as canonical; in all cases the arguments more or less triumphant against them were finally and fundamentally moral. Arguably this was outside Yingling’s interest; still, had Yingling been able to extend his study even to the process by which poets of major canonical in
terest during their lives—like Edna St. Vincent Millay, a woman, or Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a black man—were, in the years after their deaths, systematically removed from the critical center (finally by the same process that has elevated Crane), he would have given us a major political analysis of canon-formation. But for all the insight he gives us into Crane’s critical treatment, finally the process of establishing a poet or an artist’s reputation is just more complex than Yingling presents it.
O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precinct of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
In a chapter called “Words” from her wonderfully wide-ranging 1959 study, Poetry: A Modern Guide to Its Understanding and Enjoyment, critic Elizabeth Drew’s terse judgment on Crane’s address to the bridge is that it is an example of rhetoric “out of place” (p. 73). Briefly she compares it to James Thomson’s (not B.V.) (1700–1748) inflated address to a pineapple in The Seasons (1726–30):
But O thou blest Anana, thou the pride
Of vegetable life . . .
For Drew the simple juxtaposition is enough to damn both poets. Both, for her, are inflated and preposterous. One wonders, however, if Drew isn’t—possibly unconsciously—following Poe’s critique of the young American poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), a near contemporary of Keats, who died at age 25 and whose poems his friend the poet Fitzgreen Halleck published in 1836, sixteen years after Rodman’s death. In his famous review of the two poets’ work, Poe calls the invocation to Drake’s poem, “Niagara” (“Roar, raging torrent! And thou, mighty river, / Pour thy white foam on the valley below! / Frown, ye dark mountains,” etc.), “ludicrous—and nothing more. In general, all such invocations have an air of the burlesque.” But finally one wonders, with all three poems, if it is not the fact that all three examples are apostrophes (rather than the elaborateness of the language in which the apostrophes are couched) that controls the “out of place”-ness—or ludicrousness—of the figures. Wouldn’t the most colloquial, “You, waterfall!” “Hey, pineapple!” or “Yo, Bridge!” strike us as equally ludicrous or out of place?
Critic Harold Bloom has recounted (in his 1982 study Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, p. 270) how, at age ten (revised down from eleven in an earlier version of the essay, published in Alan Trachtenberg’s collection of essays on Crane), he first read, “crouched over Crane’s book in a Bronx library” sometime in the thirties, the same lines Drew denigrates. For Bloom (and, he explains, many others in that decade) they were what “cathected” him onto poetry. Like’s Marlowe’s rhetoric, Bloom argues, Crane’s was both “a psychology and a knowing, rather than a knowledge.” Begged as a present from his sister when he was twelve, Crane’s poems were the first book Bloom owned.
I recall my first reading of those lines too—as a teenager in the late fifties. (For me, Crane’s poems were among the first trade paperbacks I purchased for myself.) I suspect that, like Bloom, I was not too sure what the lines actually meant; but in dazzling me—for dazzle me they did—they established the existence of a gorgeous meta-language that held my judgment on it in suspension precisely because I could not judge the meaning, even as it was clear this meta-language, as it welcomed glorious and sensual words into itself from as far a-field as the Bible, the cowboy film, and the dictionary’s most unthumbed pages (“thou,” “cognizance,” “lariat,” “encinctured” . . .), welcomed equally such figures as the apostrophe—even more out of favor in the fifties and sixties than it is today. What this language was in the process of knowing—the psychology it proffered—was that of an animate object world, a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else—and thus the apostrophe (the means by which the poet joined in with this mysterious dialogue and antiphon) was, in that sense, at its center.
I also remember, even more forcefully, the lines that, for me—at sixteen—sent chills racing over me and, a moment later, struck me across the bridge of my nose with a pain sharp enough to make my eyes water. It came with the lines from “Harbor Dawn” that Crane the lyricist of unspeakable love had just managed to speak:
And you beside me, blesséd now while sirens
Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day—
. . . a forest shudders in your hair
For suddenly I realized that “you” was another man!
One should also note, however, I had all but the same bodily reaction to my first encounter—at about the same age—with Ernest Dowson’s “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” though the object there was clearly heterosexual—a female prostitute.
The point with Crane, however, was that there was a critical dialogue already in place around him, that could sustain the resonances of that response in the growing reader—whether that reader was Harold Bloom or I.
But while nearly everyone seems to have ravaged Dowson’s poems for titles* (Gone with the Wind, The Night Is Thine, Days of Wine and Roses, Love and Sleep . . .), no dialogue about the significance of Dowson, no argument over the meaning of the tradition he inhabited and developed, remains in place, save a few wistful comments by Yeats, and the bittersweet memoir by J. Arthur Symons that introduces at least one edition of Dowson’s poems. What’s there is a monologue, not a dialogue. And it is all too brief.
Dowson took his Latin title from the first Ode in Horace’s Book IV, in which the poet, near fifty, entreats Venus/Cynara not to visit him with love: love is for the young, such as Paulus Maximus. (“But why,” he asks in the last two stanzas, “is there a tear on my face? I still remember thee in dreams, where I chase after thee, across the green, among the waves . . .”) Horace describes Venus in the Ode as a “cruel mother,” as a goddess “hard of heart”—so that there is a good deal of irony in the line Dowson has chosen for a title, signaled by the placement of “Bonae” as far away from its noun, “Cynarae,” as it can get: “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.” (“I am not such as I was under the reign of the kindly Cynara.” The “kindly Cynara” (bonae Cynarae) is very much “Venus tout entière à saprois attaché”—kindly in the sense that the Eumenides are “the kindly ones.” To praise Dowson’s poem for its insight into the realities of love among the worldly, contrasted with the romantic memories of love among the innocent, is to revivify part of the dialogue about him. But though there was once a dialogue about Dowson, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct it from, say, the stacks of the twenty-one-story library at the University of Massachusetts—whereas the volumes debating the reputation of Crane, by comparison, practically leap from the shelves.
Another aspect of the dialogue over Crane is that at first it seems, at least to the sixteen-year-old, if not to the ten-year-old, that its questions are transparently easy to resolve. But later, we begin to notice that, even as we, like Yingling, begin to demystify some of these questions, others are revealed to be even more complex. And those questions—what are these poems about? how do they signify and continue to signify today?—invariably take us to the poems, not away from them.
But finally it is the dialogue created between the critically enlivened concept of “Crane-the-failure” and the elusive meaning of the poems themselves that sets critics listening intensely—in a way that almost no one today is prompted to listen to Winters or Ridge or Wheelright or Bodenheim, to name a handful of poets whom we turn to, if at all, because we are in pursuit of some insight Crane had while reviewing them, or because he mentioned something they wrote in a letter.
This is dialogue that sustains the new readers of Crane. This is the dialogue that makes old readers go back and reread him.
A reader of Yingling’s book with a sense of this, gay or straight, will, after a while, be compelled to observe that however much Crane was marginalized because of his homosexuality, he’s a good deal less marginal today
than any number of straight male poets of his time—certainly less so than Tate or Winters. Indeed, after Eliot, Pound, and Yeats, the only poet of his era who precedes Crane in reputation is Wallace Stevens—another male homosexual poet.
As it is now, however, that part of Yingling’s argument about Crane’s reception is open to the counterargument that if Crane had not been the “failure” he was, he might all too easily have been nothing at all!
And that is not a good argument—which is to say it only points up the weakness in Yingling’s.
Certainly it’s ironic that in 1927 Winters wrote his own poetic series, The Bare Hills (which Crane once offered to review), all but unread today, which—though it has its delicate, minor-key beauties—performs with none of the force of Crane’s work, possibly because it strives after poetry through a method insistently deaf to the processes and poetic product Winters had excoriated so in Crane. Though Crane did not review it, the reviewers of the day found The Bare Hills “austere.” The modern judgment would be, I suspect, if such a judgment could be said even to exist: thin.
In a letter to Winters, responding to Winters’s exhortation that the poet be a “complete man,” Crane ends with a warning Winters might well have heeded: “I have neglected to say,” Crane wrote, “that I admire your general attitude, including your distrust of metaphysical or other patent methods. Watch out, though, that you don’t strangulate yourself with some counter-method of your own!” For the morality of a text has to do with its use, not its intent—or, even more frequently, its lack of intent to espouse a position that a later time (sometimes only months on) has decided is more ethical than the unquestioned commonplace of an earlier moment. Would that Winters had been able to distinguish a description of a state of affairs—how language works—from a posed poetic methodology!