If any factor contributed most to the image of Crane the lyricist-sometimes-too-ambitious, it was his prosody. Eliot—and Pound, of the quintessentially experimental Cantos—was half in and half out of the traditional English language iambic pentameter measure. And when they were in it, they were often working mightily to make it vanish under the hyper-rhythms of the most ordinary speech. (“What thou lovest well remains . . .,” that most famous passage in The Pisan Cantos [Canto 81], though written in classical hexameters, strives to rewrite itself in blank tetrameter.) Crane often used a loose pentameter, however, to flail himself as far away from the syntax and diction of common speech as he could get and not have comprehension crumble entirely beneath him.
At that time, probably few would have called Crane’s poetry “experimental.” By the late fifties or early sixties (after the 1958 reprinting of his poems), Crane seemed a vivid, intense lyricist, whose poems, a little more frequently than was comfortable, lapsed over into the incomprehensible. Gertrude Stein’s considerable effect was felt almost entirely within the realm of prose. Pound and Eliot were still the models for poetic experimentation among the young. And one suspected that any experiment whose rhetorical model could not be found within them was an experiment that had failed—by definition.
Once Eliot first published them in 1917’s “Prufrock,” for the next fifty years couplets like
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
and
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
astonished young writers again and again with their LaForguian bathos. Like many poets of the twenties, Crane had followed Eliot back to LaForgue; he’d early-on translated “Three Locutions Des Pierots” from LaForgue’s French.
One of the first poems where Crane thought about responding to Eliot—one of the first to which he committed the whole of his poetic abilities and in which he first began to create lines that regularly arrived at the a-referential form we now think of as characteristic of him—was “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” But if this poem sounds like anything to the modern ear, it sounds more like a pastiche of Eliot’s “Prufrock” than a critique of it.
Crane’s feminine iambic couplets, such as
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations
Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
and
Three winged and gold-shod prophesies of heaven,
The lavish heart shall always have to leaven
must recall to the sensitive reader Eliot’s near-signature feminine rhymes:
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
For a hundred visions and revisions.
and
Oh, do not ask “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
As well, Crane’s generalized apostrophes—
O, I have known metallic paradises
Where cuckoos clucked to finches
recall not only the apostrophe above it but recall equally Prufrock’s general claims to knowledge:
And I have known them all already, known them all. . .
And I have known the eyes already, known them all. . .
And I have known the arms already, known them all. . .
Further comparison of the two poems, however, reveals a far greater metric regularity in Crane’s verse than in Eliot’s (or, if you prefer, a greater metrical variety in Eliot’s verse than in Crane’s): Eliot often pairs tetrameters with hexameters, now in trochaics, now in iambics (which the ear then tries to re-render into more traditional paired pentameters), where Crane generally relies on blank or rhymed couplets.
With a full seventy years, however, Eliot’s variety has finally been normalized and absorbed into the general range of free verse—so that it is almost hard to see his variation today as formal. As Eliot’s idiosyncrasies have become one with the baseline of American poetic diction, Crane the occasionally-over-the-top lyricist has metamorphosed into Crane the rhetorical revolutionary.
The study of eccentric figures on the poetic landscape tends to blind us, with the passage of time, to the mainstream that made the eccentric signify as it did. What was the scope of mainstream poetry during the twenties—Crane’s decade?
In 1921 Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems, with the award of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, made the fifty-year-old poet, till then all but unknown—though he had been publishing books of verse since the 1880s—into a famous man. Eliot’s Waste Land (along with Joyce’s Ulysses) appeared in 1922, but it was a success de scandal, not a popular triumph: the talk alone of people who talked of poetry. But then, that same year, so was Amy Lowell’s A Critical Fable—a humorous survey of the poetic scene since the War, whose title was taken from her forebear, James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848), both with their tour de force introductions in rhymed prose. (That same November in Paris Marcel Proust died, leaving unpublished the last three sections of his great novel.) 1923 saw Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems receive the Pulitzer. 1924 saw it go to Robert Frost for his second book- length collection, New Hampshire. That same year, Robinson Jeffers’s Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems was an extraordinary popular success with the reading public—setting off a controversy over Jeffers’s poetic merit that has not abated. In France that year, a poem touching on many of the same political concerns as Crane’s The Bridge appeared, a poem which makes an informative contrast with it: St.-John Perse’s Anabase. (Perse’s Amitie du Prince appeared the same year.) And in America in ’24, Wallace Stevens wrote what was to become one of his most famous poems, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—before entering half a dozen years of comparative poetic inactivity. And in 1925 twelve-year-old poet Nathalia Crane’s The Janitor’s Boy appeared, with introductory statements by both William Rose Benét (citing other poetic prodigies of merit, including the Scottish Marjorie Flemming, Hilda Conkling, and Scottish- born Helen Douglas Adam) and Nunnally Johnson—and went through a dozen-plus printings in no time. Robinson’s next book, The Man Who Died Twice (1925), won him another Pulitzer; the 1926 Pulitzer went, posthumously, to Amy Lowell for What’s O’Clock (published the same year—also posthumously—as her two-volume biography, John Keats). And the following year Robinson received his third Pulitzer for his book- length poem Tristram (1927)—which became a bona fide best seller. Poetry best sellers were certainly not common in those years, but they were more common than in ours. In the same year, Millay’s verse drama, on which Deems Taylor based his successful opera of the same title, The King’s Henchman, went through twelve printings between February and September (while in Germany, also in 1927, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time appeared, a work whose enterprise can be read as the cornerstone of his earliest attempts to poeticize the contemporary world, against a rigorous critique of metaphysics). That year American scholar John Livingston Lowe first published his exhaustive and illuminating findings from his researches into the early readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. In 1928, Stephen Vincent Benét’s novel in verse, John Brown’s Body, captivated the general reading public. And through it all, the various volumes of Millay, for critics like Edmund Wilson, marked the true height of American poetic achievement.
What characterizes this range of American poetry is its extraordinary referential and argumentative clarity (argument used here in terms both of narrative and of logic)—often to the detriment of all musicality (as well as rhetorical ornamentation) not completely controlled by the regularity of meter and end-rhyme.
This was the mainstream of American poetry Eliot, Pound, H. D., and William Carlos Williams—as well as Crane (and Lowell, while she was alive)—saw themselves, one way or the other, at odds with. And this is the context that explains Loveman’s seemingly gratuitous swipe at Mrs. Browning. First, the simple sexism that it represents is certainly at work in the comment—as it was a
gainst Amy Lowell, who worked as hard as any poet to ally her work and her enthusiasms with the new. To deny it would be as absurd as denying the homophobia Yingling found at work in the structure of the reputation of Crane. But, we must also remember, as a traditional poet, Elizabeth Browning was popular, even in the twenties. She was accessible. Thus she was seen to be on the side of referential clarity that those associated with the avant-garde felt called upon to denigrate. But, as is the case with the homophobia directed toward Crane, we must remember that it works not to obliterate the reputation, but rather to hold the reputation at a particular point—which was and is, finally, higher than that of many male poets of the time.
Today, it’s the Language Poets whose works wrench Crane out of his position as a lyricist-too-extreme and forces us to reread him as a rhetorical revolutionary. Precisely what has been marginalized in the early readings of Crane—or, at any rate, pointed at with wagging finger as indicative of some essential failure—is now brought to the critical center and made the positive node of attention.
For what is now made the center of our rhetorical concern with Crane is precisely that “verbiage” Loveman would have stripped from the work—those moments where referentiality fails and language is loosed to work on us in its most immediate materiality.
Again and again through Crane’s most varied, most exciting poems, phrases and sentences begin which promise to lead us to some referen- tially satisfying conclusion, through the form of some poetic figure. And again and again what Crane presents us with to conclude those figures is simply a word—a word that resists any and all save the most catachrestic of referential interpretations, so that readers are left with nothing to contemplate save what language poet Ron Silliman has called the pure “materiality of the signifier.” It is easy to see (and to say) that Crane’s poetry foregrounds language, making readers revel in its sensuousness and richness. But one of the rhetorical strategies by which he accomplishes this in line after line is simply to shut down the semantic, referential instrumentality of language all but completely:
Time’s rendings, time’s blendings they construe
As final reckonings of fire and snow.
Or:
The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn.
Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.
The final words—“spawn,” “fire and snow”—arrive in swirling atmospheres of connotation, to which they even contribute; but reference plays little part in the resolution of these poetic figures. Reading only begins with such lines as one turns to clarify how they resist reference, resist interpretation, even as their syntax seems to court them. But to find examples we can look in any of Crane’s mature work.
In 1963—the same year I was having the conversation about T. S. Eliot with the aforementioned poet—in France Michel Foucault was writing, in an essay on contemporary fiction, that the problem was not that “language is a certain distance from things. Language is the distance.”
Thirty years before, Crane’s suicide had put an end to a body of work that—not till twice thirty years later—would be generally acknowledged as among the earlier texts to inhabit that distance directly and, in so inhabiting it, shift an entire current of poetic sensibility in a new direction.
We like to tell tales of how confident our heroes are in their revolutionary pursuits. But it is more honest, in Crane’s case at any rate, to talk about how paralyzingly unsure he was—at least at times—about precisely this aspect of his work; though, frankly, in the twenties, how could he have felt otherwise?
In a 1963 interview, Loveman recounted:
Once—I don’t know whether I ever told you—he tried to commit suicide in my presence.
We had been out having dinner; he got raffishly high and we went to a lovely restaurant in the Village. No one was there but Didley Digges, the actor, in one corner. Hart waltzed me over to him with a low bow. Then he began to dance mazurkas on the floor. He loved to dance. It was a big room, and we had an excellent dinner. He got a little higher, and when he went out, as usual, he bargained with a taxi driver. He would never pay more than two dollars fare to Brooklyn. And then, usually, because he always forgot that he hadn’t money with him, the person with him had to pay it. Through some mishap, we landed at the Williamsburg Bridge. I think there is a monument or a column there and Hart went up and as a matter of rite or sacrilege pissed against it. Then we started across to Columbia Heights. He lived at Number 110. When we got to Henry Street, it was around eleven or eleven-thirty. In one of the doorways we saw four legs sticking out and a sign, “We are not bums.” They were going to an early market and their wagon was parked in the street. Hart became hysterical with laughter. Well, when we got to Columbia Heights, the mood changed. The entire situation changed. He broke away from me and ran straight up the three flights of stairs, then up the ladder to the roof, and I followed him. I was capable of doing that then. As he got to the top, he threw himself over the roof and I grabbed his leg, one leg, and, oh, I was scared to death. And I said, “You son of a bitch! Don’t you every try that on me again.” So he picked himself up and said, “I might as well, I’m only writing rhetoric.”
Here the interviewer comments: “That’s what was bothering him.” And Loveman continues:
He could no longer write without the aid of music or of liquor. It was impossible. He had reached the horrible impasse. So, we went downstairs to his room. I lived a couple of doors away. I worried myself sick about him. He poured himself some Dago Red, turned on the Victrola, and I left him.
How important this incident might have been for Crane is hard to tell. Was it a drunken jape, forgotten the next morning? Or does it represent the deep and abiding Veritas classically presumed to reside in vino? Again, none of the three major biographers utilizes it.
Unterecker characterizes Crane as a “serious drinker” from the summer of ’24 on. But drunkenness figures in Crane’s letters—and in the apocryphal tales about him—from well before. And as so many people have pointed out, in trying to explain the context of prohibition in cities like New York and Chicago to people who did not live through it, even though alcohol was outside the law, it was so widely available the problem was not how to get it but rather how to stay sober enough to conduct the business of ordinary life!
It was a problem many in that decade failed to solve—Crane among them.
Let me attempt here, however, what I will be the first to admit is likely an over-reading of the evening Loveman has described with Crane—with all its a-specific vagaries.
The night begins in a Village restaurant, with an actor, a speaker of other writers’ words. Directly following, a cab driver mangles Crane’s (or possibly Loveman’s) verbal instructions home: “Take us across the Bridge to Brooklyn . . .”
But instead of taking them to the Brooklyn Bridge, the driver takes them to the Williamsburg Bridge at Delancey Street—where, realizing how far off they are, they get out.
In the nighttime plaza before the Williamsburg, Crane urinates on a public monument.
A public monument makes a certain kind of public statement. To urinate on such a monument is, at the very least, to express one’s contempt in the most bodily way possible (short of smearing it with shit) for its sen- tentiousness, its pomposity, its civic pretension—those enunciational aspects traditionally designated by the phrase “empty rhetoric.”
But to recount the above in this way is to point out that we have begun an evening where every event, as narrated by Loveman, one way or another foregrounds a more and more problematic relation with language—specifically with something about its rhetoricity.
Having given up the errant cab, Crane and Loveman decide to walk home, down through the Lower East Side, presumably for the Brooklyn Bridge, to cross over to 110 Columbia Heights by foot. (At the time, Loveman—a published poet in his own right, as well as, later, an editor of some reputation—tells us further on in the interview, John Dos Passos lived in the apartment below C
rane’s.) Crossing Henry Street, around the corner from the great daily markets of Orchard and Hester, just up from the Fulton Fish Market, they find two men sleeping together in a doorway, legs sticking out. There is the identifying cardboard: “We are not bums,” which reduces Crane to hysteria—as he perceives the comedy of rhetoric at its most referential, stating what the speaker/writer hopes to make obvious in fear of the very misreading the writing presumes to obviate, participating through it in the same pretentious inflation on which, fifteen minutes before, Crane had just emptied his bladder.
It intrigues me that that night’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, usually such a positive symbol for Crane, and across which he had walked before holding hands with Emil, is elided from Loveman’s account. Does the elision suggest that—that night—the Bridge did not have the usual uplifting effect on Crane that, often in the past, it had had? Is there anything that we can retrieve from the elision? What, on any late night’s stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1920s, were two gay men likely to see, regardless of their mood?
The nighttime walkways of the city’s downtown bridges have traditionally been heavy homosexual cruising areas, practically since their opening—one of the reasons that, indeed, after dark, Crane and Emil had been able to wander across it—holding hands—with minimal fear of recriminations. They certainly could have not walked so during the day.
But perhaps that evening, with his old friend Loveman, on the Bridge’s cruisy boardwalk, Crane might have heard the rich and pointed banter of a group of dishy queens lounging against the rail, or, perhaps, even the taunts leveled at them from a passing gaggle of sailors—who often crossed the Bridge back to the Navy Yard, in their uneasy yet finally symbiotic relationship with the bridge’s more usual nighttime pedestrians. But even if the bridge were deserted that night, even if we do not evoke the memory of language to fulfill the place of living language, we can still assume without much strain that the conversation of the two men, at least now and again, touched on those subjects which it would have been impossible for such as they to cross the bridge at such an hour and not think of—in short, something in the human speech that occurred in that elided journey, whether the received public banter of cross-dressers or simply the speculation of Crane and Loveman to one another, is likely to have broached those sexual areas so easily and usually characterized as residing outside of language—at least outside that language represented by the municipal monument, outside that language which claims rhetorical density by only stating the true, the obvious, the inarguable—even as the very act of stating them throws such truths and inarguables into hysterical question. (To indulge in gay gossip, or indeed in any socially private sub-language, unto the language of poetry itself, is at once to take up and to invest with meaning an order of rhetoric the straight world—especially in the twenties—claims is empty, meaningless, and at the same time always suspected of pathology . . .) This, at any rate, is the place we can perhaps also best contextualize the urgency behind Crane’s operatically passionate addresses to Loveman in his letter. One begins with the obvious statement that this was pre- Stonewall. But one must follow it with the observation that it was also pre-Matachine Society—which is to say, this rhetoric is from the homosexual tradition that the Matachine Society was both to spring from and (after its radical opening years under Harry Haye) to set itself against: the Matachines, recall, would eventually seek equal rights for homosexuals under the program that claimed homosexual males could be just like other men if they tried, and that they did not have to live their lives at such an intense level of passion in their relationships with their love objects and their friends, of the sort represented by Crane’s exhortations to his friend Loveman. It is the situation that defined, at the time, a distinct, homosexual male community.