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Reviewed by:
  • Hart Crane: After His Lights
  • Stephen Burt
Hart Crane: After His Lights. Brian Reed. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. viii+312 pp. $65.00 (cloth).

This good book about Hart Crane’s poetry—the first monograph on Crane in over ten years, and the first since Langdon Hammer’s big edited volume of Crane’s letters (O My Land My Friends, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997)—pursues three strong arguments, and one weak one. All four might change (at least slightly) how we read other modernist poets, Williams among them.

The first strong argument has to do with Crane’s forebears: prior critics have almost uniformly found his models in an American Romantic tradition stemming [End Page 168] from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Reed shows that Crane’s preoccupations, his meters and stanzas, and his whole way of thinking about what poems can do, owe more to the late nineteenth century’s British Decadents—to Oscar Wilde (whom Crane’s first published poem memorialized) but above all to Algernon Charles Swinburne, whom Crane read avidly and imitated covertly. This “mannerist” (17) legacy makes Crane look “more ‘British’ in his poetic sensibility than scholars” have heretofore seen (27). Pursuing the sexual implications of decadent styles, Reed also likens Crane to Djuna Barnes, both queer writers whose “‘broken’ decadent forms [. . .] acknowledge the obsolescence, the ruination, of fin de siècle camp” (51) in the wake of the Wilde trials. The semantically shaky, aurally lush, sometimes redundant verbal world of Swinburne—especially of his now little-read long poems—helps show why Crane’s poems sound as they do: it might prompt critics even of such defiantly American writers as Williams to ask what other transatlantic links we have missed. (“There’s so much of the Spanish stuff that is unknown, old and new,” Williams told James Laughlin [SL 183]; despite such studies as Julio Marzán’s The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams [Austin: U of Texas P, 1994], that may still be the case.)

Reed’s second, and more ambitious, argument connects Crane’s poetic innovations to the history of music, and to the history of technology. Crane composed with a phonograph at top volume, playing nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera and orchestral music (such as Ravel’s Boléro) if available, the day’s pop hits if not. These earsplitting, sometimes drunken bouts of writing while the same 78 played, over and over, preceded—for the poems Crane regarded as finished—sober sessions of editing and revision. This part of Reed’s study displays simultaneous and majestic commands of biographical and manuscript minutiae, of musicology and reception history (what did “Wagner” signify in America in 1923?) and of the history of recording (how did most people listen to 78s in the 1920s? how much music fit on each side?). Reed finds both an analogy, and a homology, between the ways Crane’s words work, on the one hand, and on the other the Craneian experience of hearing—out of sequence and repeated ad lib, “pared down, and strung together”—short parts of operatic and orchestral compositions, as Crane would have heard them on his “post-Edison but pre-LP” 78s (122–23). Here is historical, multidisciplinary scholarship at its best. It turns out to be biographical scholarship too, since “Crane treat[ed] his romance with [the sailor Emil] Opffer in the same manner that he treated Boléro,” repeating its erotic buildup over and over, with no clear sense of plot, and no finale (115).

Crane’s modes of listening and his tastes in nineteenth-century poetry together let Reed explain, and celebrate, the absence of something Crane’s earlier critics sought: an implied development, or argument, or plot, among the sections of The [End Page 169] Bridge. There isn’t one; there doesn’t have to be (and it might be heterosexist to think otherwise). Swinburne’s long poem Tristram of Lyonesse “attempts to transpose Wagnerian instrumentation into English verse,” and “The Bridge often sounds like Tristram [. . .] run through a food processor,” stripped of its teleologies, all texture and sound, its intellectual implications based not on development in any musicological...

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