Longer Views (42 page)

As Edelman suggests, perhaps the most careful account of Crane's “failure” is first laid out in Yvor Winters's quite extraordinary essay, “The Significance of
The Bridge
by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” reprinted in Winters's 1943 collection,
On Modern Poets
. There Winters relates Crane's enterprise to the pernicious and maniagenic ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson
via
the irreligious pantheism (read: relativism—in “Passage to India” Whitman blasphemes by claiming the poet is “the true son of God”) of Whitman and the glossolomania of Mallarmé. (At least that's how Winters saw them.) Winters had begun as one of Crane's most enthusiastic advocates. The two had an extensive correspondence—as well as one warm and productive meeting. But, on the publication of
The Bridge
in 1930, a growing doubt about Crane's achievement finally erupted in Winters's review. Over it, the two men broke. But it is important to realize that the rejection—or at least the condemnation—of Crane, for Winters as well as for many of Crane's critics, was the rejection and condemnation of an entire romantic current in American literary production, a current that included Whitman and Emerson, with Crane only as its latest, cracked and misguided voice. Those who shared Winters's judgments, like Brom Weber and R. P. Blackmur, also felt T. S. Eliot was as much of a failure as, or more of a failure than, Crane, and for the same reasons!

It is also worth noting that Winters's piece, while it is far more illuminative of what was going on, because it is more articulate about its anti-Emerson, anti-Whitman, and finally anti-American position (as well as those European currents, like Mallarmé, that Winters saw as supporting it) than many others, was also practically without influence—because it was all but unavailable from the time Winters wrote it until the sixties.

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 interest 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.