With the publication of HART CRANE's complete poems by the Library of America, his long-contended reputation seems secure. To take stock of Crane's achievement and influence, Bookforum presents an essay by Mark Ford and appreciations by Robert Kelly, C. D. Wright, John Yau, and Wayne Koestenbaum, along with a review by Brian Blanchfield of a recent study of the poet's reputation.
HART CRANE'S FIRST PUBLISHED POEM appeared in Bruno's Weekly in September 1916, when he was only seventeen. It was entitled "C 33," a reference to the cell number of Reading Gaol's most famous prisoner, Oscar Wilde, whom Crane figures weaving "rose-vines / About the empty heart of night" and venting "his long mellowed wines / Of dreaming on the desert white." Wilde had in fact offered to induct the good burghers of Crane's native Cleveland into the delights of aestheticism in the course of his 1882 lecture tour of America, but he had made few converts. Crane presents himself as a late disciple-particularly through that pun on heart-but also as one who plans to surpass the "song of minor, broken strain" to which Wilde's tribulations reduced him. Though moved to tears by the great aesthete's sufferings, in "C 33" Crane sternly rejects the temptations of "penitence" to which he felt Wilde had succumbed in writings such as De Profundis and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."
Crane's refusal to recant is one of the dominant motifs of his poetry and letters. "I am not ready for repentance," he declares in "Legend," the opening poem of his first collection, White Buildings (1916). In "Lachrymae Christi," whose title refers not just to the tears of Jesus but also to a sweet red Neapolitan wine to which Crane was partial, he promises "Not penitence / But song." And in the summer of 1926, after his expulsion from his domestic m�nage � trois with the poet Alien Tate and the novelist Caroline Gordon (who was married to Tate), Crane defiantly wrote: "Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and mockery." The epigraph for While Buildings is taken from Rimbaud's Illuminations and signals from the outset Crane's reckless vision of his poethood: "Ce ne peut �tre que la fin du monde, en avan�ant." But this splendid new collection edited by Langdon Hammer, one of Crane's most illuminating modern critics, of the complete poems and selected prose and letters (some previously unpublished) (Library of America, $40) gives the lie yet again to the notion that Crane can be dismissed as merely a reckless failure, or even a magnificent one.
For while Crane thrilled to what he called "the rapturous and explosive destructivism" of Rimbaud's apocalyptic strophes, his own poetry set itself a wholly antithetical task. Like Whitman, Crane saw himself as an inspired prophet of America's destiny, as a national bard whose vaulting epic, The Bridge (1930), would marshal the newly developed techniques of modernist poetry to articulate a very unmodernist faith in the present and the future. For Crane, as indeed for older poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, the great antagonist was that turncoat Eliot, whose The Waste Land Williams once described as "the great catastrophe to our letters." While Crane accepted that the poem was "good, of course," he also complained it was "so damned dead." A few months before its appearance in 1922, he acknowledged to Tate that he had been wrestling with Eliot "for four years,-and while I haven't discovered a weak spot yet in his armour,-I flatter myself a little lately that I have discovered a safe tangent to strike which, if I can possibly explain the position,-goes through him toward a different goal."
That goal was a poetry that used Eliot's sophisticated methods of collage and allusion not to expose the futility and failures of the era but to discover and celebrate what the poem "The Wine Menagerie" calls "New thresholds, new anatomies!" His letter to Tate continues:
In his own realm Eliot presents us with an absolute impasse yet oddly enough, he can he utilized to lead us to, intelligently point to, other positions and "pastures new." Having absorbed him enough we tan trust ourselves as never before, in the air or on the sea. I, for instance, would like to leave a few of his "negations" behind me, risk the realm of the obvious more, in quest of new sensations.
THE BRIDGE WAS INTENDED TO REVERSE the pessimistic cultural diagnosis of modernity presented by The Waste Land and instead to "enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America," as he put it in a letter to the wealthy banker and patron of the arts Otto H. Kahn while touting for sponsorship of his visionary project. Crane first conceived of The Bridge in early 1923. The idea of the poem triggered in him dizzying "cogitations and cerebral excitements," he wrote to his close friend Gorham Munson on February 18: Should he succeed, "such a waving of banners, such ascent of towers, such dancing etc, will never before have been put down on paper!" A couple of days later, he sent poet Wilbur Underwood a draft of what he planned to be the conclusion:
And midway on that structure I would stand
One moment, not as diver, but with arms
That open to project a disk's resilience
Winding the sun and planets in its face.
The Brooklyn Bridge was to be transformed into a symbol of all manner of "mystic possibilities." Crane here figures himself as orchestrating a "poised and deathless dance" between bridge, sun, sky, sea, and city, between poetry and history, between past, present, and future. His pausing "midway on that structure" might look suicidal, but bis open arms are those ot a dancer, not a diver.
But expanding this vision into a long poem that convincingly dramatized its promises proved acutely difficult. In April 1914, Crane moved with his then lover, Emil Opffer, into a room at no Columbia Heights in Brooklyn that commanded a spectacular view of the East River, the Statue of Liberty, downtown Manhattan, and "the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge." His affair with Opffer was the most ecstatic of his life and even seemed a fulfillment of his imaginings of his masterwork: "I have seen the Word made Flesh," he wrote to the cultural critic Waldo Frank.
In the deepest sense, where flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counter-response, where sex was beaten out, where a purity of joy was reached that included tears.... And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstacy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.
While Eliot lamented failed relationships and sexual and spiritual sterility, Crane set about devising an unironic modernist idiom as conscious as Eliot's of literary history but also capable of exploring and rejoicing in the beating out of sex. In "Voyages," composed during the course of his relationship with Opffer, he insistently reworks the traditions of love poetry to create an erotically expansive lyricism at once reflexive and transgressive, a "silken skilled transmemberment of song." Crane's voyaging here entails a rapturous suspension of meaning, a delighted, sensual dwelling in the possibilities of response and coimterresponse:
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.
The most useful gloss on such lines, and on White Buildings as a whole, is a sentence from an essay of Crane's entitled "General Aims and Theories," published in 1925:
It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward.
Crane didn't embark in earnest on The Bridge until 1926. Kahn rather surprisingly proved receptive to his pleas for assistance, agreeing to sponsor the impecunious poet to the tune of two thousand dollars. Elated, Crane arranged to rent the upstairs rooms of the Tales' farmhouse outside Patterson, New York, and set to. "Atlantis," the poem's final section, was the first to be drafted. He cut the image of himself with open arms halfway across the bridge and instead presented himself in the supplicant posture of a disembodied Orpheus: "Atlantis,-hold thy floating singer late!" The diver he declared himself not to be was transferred to the proem "To Brooklyn Bridge":
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning
Crane himself plunged into books such as Christopher Columbus's Journal and Waldo Frank's Virgin Spain in order to develop the backstory to the triumphant synthesis of the American covenant embodied in the Roeblings' masterly feat of engineering, which "Atlantis" converts into a holy fulfillment of the ideal of the New World-hailing it, with the extravagance that indelibly marks his poetic vocabulary, as "Psalm of Cathay!," as love's "white, pervasive Paradigm ... !," as "Forever Deity's glittering Pledge," as "pardon for this history, whitest Flower, / O Answerer of all."
Crane's obsession with acts of unifying, bridging, linking, reconciling opposites, must be seen, in part, at least, as a response to the multiple rifts in his parents' marriage during his childhood and adolescence. Crane's father, Clarence Arthur, known as CA, was a successful manufacturer of candy-he, in fact, invented the Life Saver-while his more artistic mother was prone to nervous maladies and breakdowns. They quarreled incessantly, separated on numerous occasions, and finally divorced in 1916.1 he previous year, in the course of a particularly acrimonious dispute during a holiday at a property the family owned on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, fifteen-year-old Harold, as he was still then known, had attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. The year after the divorce, it was the turn of Grace, his mother: Following a failed reconciliation with CA, she swallowed a nearly fatal dose of bichloride of mercury. Crane, on the whole, took her side, as symbolized by his adopting her maiden-and his middle-name as his first name in 1917. His hard-driving father chivied him to get a job and, given his wealth, offered only minimal financial support; his overpossessive mother cosseted and badgered him while also shamelessly exploiting him in her battles with CA, whenever possible making him part of the ongoing psychodrama of her unstable existence. Following a dispute over a legacy left him by his grandmother, Crane finally severed all ties with her in 1918. With his father he established amicable relations only in 1931, shortly before CA's death, and his own.
Crane was not suited to domesticity, as Tate and Gordon soon found to their cost. "God save me," Gordon complained, "from ever having another romantic in the house with me!" Crane burst in on them without apology whenever moved to expound the details of some new poetic theory. No Frostian, he refused to chop wood because it "constricted his imagination." Further, he was deeply hurt by a Tate review of Eliot's Poems 19090 -7925, in which the older poet signaled a decisive move away from Crane's upbeat, ecstatic vision of modernism and America and planted himself firmly in the Eliot camp. On April 16, 1916, after months of simmering resentment, mother bitter argument ended with Crane packing his bags and departing in high dudgeon.
By this time, he was broke again. He returned to New York and, after much wheedling ot his mother, managed to get permission to spend the coming summer on the estate on the Isle of Pines, where, in an extraordinary burst of creativity, he composed nearly all the best sections of The Bridge. If only a hurricane hadn't struck the island in late October, making the house uninhabitable, he might have tinished it then and there. In any event, the poem was not to be completed and published until 1930, by which time Crane's ever-worsening alcoholism and increasingly erratic behavior had alienated him from many of those whose approbation he most craved.
Another crucial division in Crane's life was that between his sophisticated literary friends, who were nearly all straight, and the countless sailors, or gobs, as he called them, he encountered during his nights cruising the waterlront, often under the assumed name ot Mike Orayton (in homage to the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton, author of "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part"). Like his drinking, Crane's sexual proclivities grew more and more extreme. By the time he arrived in Mexico in April 1931, an unlikely Guggenheim Fellow, he was, or so he told Katherine Anne Porter, prey "to images of erotic frenzy and satisfactions for which he could find no counterpart in reality .... He now found himself imagining that if he could see blood, or cause it to be shed, he might be satisfied." Porter also left a memorable account of Crane when tar gone in his cups:
His voice at these times was intolerable; a steady harsh inhuman bellow which stunned the ears and shocked the nerves and caused the heart to contract. In this voice and with words so foul there is no question of repeating them, he cursed separately and hy name the moon, and its light: the heliotrope, the heaven-tree, the sweet-by-night, the star jessamine, and their perfumes. He cursed the air we breathed together, the pool of water with its two small ducks luiddlei! at the edge, and the vines on the wall and the house. But those were not the things he hated. I Ie did not even hate us, for we were nothing to him. He hated and (eared himselt.
At other times, he would weep and shout, "I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ." Certainly, a sense of betrayal stalks many of Crane's late poems and fragments. In one entitled "Purgatorio," he grieves:
My country, O my land, my lriends
Am I apart,-here� from you in a land
Where all your gas lights-taces,-sputum gleam
Like something left, lorsaken,-here am I
Especially wounding for Crane had heen reviews of The Bridge by two erstwhile allies and friends, Tate and Yvor Winters, which appeared in Hound dr Horn and Poetry, respectively. Winters, despite having responded favorably to many of the sequence's individual lyrics when sent drafts of them, dismissed the poem overall as lacking "restraint," as indeed "a form of hysteria." The Bridge, he argued, revealed "the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration," and he denounced Crane's moving gesture of affiliation with Whitman at the end of the "Cape Hatteras" section ("My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman- / so-") as "desperately sentimental." Then Tate, who in his foreword to White Buildings had praised, with certain reservations, Crane's "fresh vision ot the world," complained that The Bridge was a "sentimental muddle" and illustrated a dangerous "rejection of a rational and qualitative will." You don't have to be a queer theorist to decode the implications ot such terms: Underlying both Winters's judgment and Tate's were a dislike of Crane's homosexuality and a conviction that no homosexual could write a convincing American epic. Alas, this became thestandard line on the poem, and the poet's career came to be read as a cautionary tale rather than as a courageous and passionate quest for "new sensations, humeurs." For decades he was, as Robert Lowell put it in "Words for Hart Crane," a poem published in Life Studies at the end of the homophobic, as well as tranquilized, '505, a "stranger in America." It was not really until the appearance of John Unterecker's biography, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, at the end of the next decade, that he came to be widely considered a major American poet. Since then, however, his stock has risen steadily, and there are now dozens of academic monographs devoted to him. This sumptuous new edition is one further proof of his now-secure place in the canon.
Crane completed only one poem in Mexico, the astonishing "The Broken lower," at once a summation of his life's work, a self-elegy, and a reaftirmation of faith in his primary vision ot his poethood-"What I hold healed, original now, ami pure . . ." Here Crane's baroque rhetoric achieves a dazzling pathos and power:
And so it was I entered the hroken world
To traee the visionary company ot love, its voice
An instant in the wind ? know not whither hurled)
But not lor long to hold each desperate choice.
Hoping the poem presaged a return ol inspiration, he dispatched it with high hopes to Morion Dauwcn Zabel of I'octry. Unfortunately, it got lost in the post. One ot his very last letters was a follow-up to XaK-I inquiring whether he'd received what turned out to be Crane's final poetic testament. Fortunately, Crane also sent copies to Samuel Loveman and Malcolm Cowley, the estranged husband of his current consort, Peggy Cowley.
"People will love Hart when he's dead," the critic Kenneth Burke is said to have remarked. "The Broken Tower" itself alludes to the encroachment of legend on his poetic vitality, the urge to yield, as Crane felt Wilde had done, to the myth ot the martyr, "In wounds pledged once to hope,-cleft to despair?" But while the poem resists such temptations, his suicide sealed the pact forever. Traveling back by sea from Veracruz to New York after his Guggcnhcini money ran out, Crane hail little to look forward to. His relationship with Peggy Cowley, the only heterosexual attair of his life, had done little to curb his excesses. On the boat he drank steadily. The night of April 16, 1952, he paid a visit to the sailors' quarters, where he was robbed and assaulted. The following day, around noon, he appeared on deck with a black eye, wearing his coat over his pajamas. "He walked to the railing," a fellow passenger recalled, "took oft his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck), placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes, and then dropped back again. . . . We all tell silent and watched him . . . wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea."
His last words to Peggy had been, "I'm not going to make it, dear. I'm utterly disgraced." One witness reported seeing him "swimming strongly," but the ( )i'i;.//>ii lowered its lifeboats in vain.
[Sidebar]
Crane's obsession with acts of unifying, bridging, linking, reconciling opposites, must be seen, in part, at least, as a response to the multiple rifts in his parents' marriage during his childhood and adolescence.
[Sidebar]
Wayne Koestenbaum
Lacan said, in a seminar, that the signifier is stupid. Stupid and, I'd add, gorgeous. Crane's lines quiver with a weary, unsatisfied mucosity. They remind me of Robert Lowell's thick lines of steel (as in "buns of steel"). In Crane's buns/lines I love the purposeless buildup, the hefty, panting artifice. His lines want to "get off," but they can't. Facture rules Crane's poems: They are drunk with the signs of his fat hand.
Crane didn't "influence" me. But his desire influenced me-his wish to be a pumped-up poet, to write lines obscenely loaded with ore, after Shelley or Keats. In slightly bad taste, Crane's lines just miss being so sublime you want to jump into their Etna. Sublimity doesn't sit still long enough for him to reach it; spurned, his syntax contorts, pugilistically.
Reading Crane is like eating a napoleon. I'm afraid my fork will crack the structure. Sometimes I choke on the powdered sugar.
When I write, I'm always not yet a poet; I'm a striven a yearner, hoping to crash the House of Poetry. I stand outside, like Stella Dallas, hungering. Crane must have felt like an outsider to Poetry. He wrote high because he wanted to push his way in. Aspirational, toked-up, Crane's language articulates that forlorn position of gazing into the future, into Poetry as futural.
"Smutty wings flash out equivocations": His equivocations, always implicitly smutty, perform the arabesque-pardon the Orientalism-of perversity. Crane discovered that desire hurts, that desire is filthy, that desire never reaches its object. So he manufactured excessive verses that trip past pat signification, leaving behind a mess. Or a maze. Inside the folds, some beast is being sacrificed. Its screams are audible.
Wayne Koestenbaum's fifth book of poetry. Best-SeW/rig Jewish Porn Films, was published by Turtle Point in 2006. His seventh book of prose, Hole/ Theory, is due out from Soft Skull in May 2007. He is professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center.
John Yau
Hart Crane arrived at his concisions and shifts without using collage. This distinguishes him from both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and contributes to his unique style. Collage has been transmitted from generation to generation, but what Crane did was different. In the "Cutty Sark" section of The Bridge, one reads: "Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke, / and rum was Plato in our heads." There are no transitions, no explanations; everything has been compressed. Later, in the same section, within a fiveline stanza, he yokes together "donkey engine" and "Canal / in Panama," then "Yucatan selling kitchenware," "Popocatepetl," and "birdless mouth / with ashes sifting down-." The effect is dizzying even as one realizes that this is simply a man speaking about his work life. After Yvor Winters read Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Wreck of the Deutschland" to the poet, Crane wrote Winters: "I did not know that words could come so near a transfiguration to pure musical notation-at the same time retaining every minute literal signification!" Poetry, according to Louis Zukofsky, exists in a zone whose upper limit is music and lower limit is speech. At the current moment, when poets are divided between those who believe that the poem is synonymous with its author's voice and those who believe that it is not speech but text, it is useful to remember that Crane wanted to compress both speech and music into a grammar that could turn, shift, or jump off at any point in the line. He achieved something close to what we find in contemporary art-inseparable juxtapositions.
John Yau is a poet and critic whose books include Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin, 2006) and the forthcoming The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press). AGuggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts.Rutgers University.
[Sidebar]
C. D. Wright
There is something so moving in Crane's lofty positioning in and against the permanently depressed and etiolated space of T. S. Eliot. Something noble in his exquisite quest for a language that could span great divides in time and "all that amplitude that time explores." He doesn't amble loquaciously through the streets toward the future with Whitman's outsize self-confidence, nor does he hurtle ecstatically forward. Instead, Crane struggles between careful, clean stanzas and the overelaborations of an autodidact who simply cannot leave a word unwrought. He shifts from the old metrical sureties to the altered states of Rimbaud or Poe.
Out of this opulent, unassimilable language is the wonder of tremendous individual effort-it raises his bridge, as it does his final broken tower. He feels not so much expansive as grand. So one has to reckon constantly with the grandness of his vision, besieged by doubt but determined to be hopeful. However tortured the poetic direction taken, there's an ever-present oppositional pull. That feeling saturates his choices, yet it is always in motion-after subsiding, it comes crashing back. The rhythm is reliable-the ear never fails.
One could even say that he brought beauty back to us; at least, he caused it to drag a lonely hand through the waters. "And you others," he charges us yet, "follow your arches / To what corners of the sky they pull you to."
C. D. Wnght has published numerous volumes of poetry including, most recently. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005) and Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2002). both from Copper Canyon Press. She teaches writing at Brown University.
Robert Kelly
Always particular. He worked without theory. Means he worked from error, as from pain. Crane's imperfections helped me-gorgeous imagery in austere vocabulary, his failures, willfully seeking rhymes and symmetries when his hungry mind found only the outspread limbs of the world. His other hunger, for the norms of poetry (neat rooms of measured stanzas), a norm that tried to pacify his life, showed me how that striving blurs vision but sometimes reaches the heart. With which one needs to read Crane. The hunger for norm had nothing to do with feeling-it was a shy hunger, a child's hunger to appease the inner doubter, to win admission to some circle of craft.
What excited me was his struggle: Between the vivid verbal seeing/knowing in the moment and the clamor for a formal sheen, there was a battle between present and presentation. What moved me most were the fragments and the uncompleted. Xochipilli, the flayed god, for whom one of his last poems, "The Circumstance," strove to speak.
Late one night in my teens, I was drinking with an older woman, no names please, in the Kettle of Fish on Macdougal. We got around to Crane, and she told me the truth. She had been on the boat: Crane didn't kill himself-that romantic leap into the oceaning night. He was murdered by sailors who had hurt him so badly in rough sex that they were scared he'd have them arrested when they got to port. So they threw him overboard. This terrible story comforts me with its truth. To the end he chose experience, not the stifling of it.
Robert Kelly's most recent books of poetry are Lapis (Godine, 2005), Shame/Scham. a collaboration with Birgit Kempker (McPherson & Co, 2005), and Threads (First Intensity, 2006). He teaches in the Writing Program at Bard College.
[Author Affiliation]
Mark Ford's A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews (Waywiser Press) was published last year. His most recent collection of poems, Soft Sift, was published by Harcourt in 2003. (see Contributors.)
[Author Affiliation]
MARK FORD is professor of English and American literature at University College London. Editor of Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter" and Other Poems (Carcanet, 2003) and two anthologies of the New York Poets (one coedited with Trevor Winkfield), he is the author of two books of poetry: Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992) and Soft Sift (Harcourt, 2001). Last year, a selection of his essays and reviews was published as A Driftwood Altar by Waywiser Press. For this issue, Ford considers the artistry of poet Hart Crane.
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