Hart Crane: After His Lights

6. Paul Blackburn’s Crane

Nebulous declarations of “in®uence” have long been a regular feature of the canon formation game, a means of sorting writers into camps, clans, and traditions. For many critics—Harold Bloom most notably—authorial in®uence is analogous to parental authority. As chapter 1 indicates, Bloom and his followers believe that the literary ¤eld is generationally divided and oedipally organized. A writer’s greatness is measured by his or her ability to reinvent “transumptively” the poetry of a chosen precursor. This logic reduces literary history to a connect-the-dots parent-child family tree: Bloom’s favorite run is Wordsworth-Emerson-Whitman-Stevens-Ashbery. In turn, these descent lines de¤ne the scope and character of literary scholarship. One need study only these heroic individuals and their intergenerational con®ict in order to contribute to the larger ¤eld. This reductive deployment of “in®uence” depends on an impoverished sense of how and why poets write. Poets rarely if ever limit themselves to extended, insistent imitatio of a single precursor. In the course of learning their art, apprentice poets tend to read widely and deeply. They are also likely to explore their interests forward and backward in time. Why not read Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, and Donne—as Crane did—in addition to or in place of work by one’s immediate poetic elders? Why not, too, prize the work of one’s contemporaries—as Crane did Allen Tate’s, Laura Riding’s, Gertrude Stein’s, and James Joyce’s? “In®uence” is not a slow stream with easy stages. It more closely resembles the U.S. telephone system: a web of ephemeral far-®ung connections that take place via legacy equipment, new hardware, multiple operating systems, and improvised software patches. Poststructuralism did literary history a great service by replacing “in®uence ”with “intertextuality”as a foundational concept.1 Intertextuality as the 6 Paul Blackburn’s Crane preferred term refocuses critical attention on the diversity, multiplicity, and unpredictability of relations between texts. It does not prejudge the course, limits, or character of such relations, nor does it evoke generational metaphors , Freudian or otherwise. Finally, it indicates nothing about the stature of the relevant texts and authors. An intertext for a given passage in Finnegans Wake could just as easily be an anonymous 1930s pornographic broadside as Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Intertextuality can exist among Japanese ¤lms of the occupation era, or among U.S. Supreme Court cases, or Renaissance medical textbooks. Once “in®uence” is safely exiled to the outer dark, the cult of the genius author gives way to an expanded ¤eld for historical , sociological, and cultural inquiry. Part 3 of this book does not quarrel with the demise of the pass-the-torch genius pageant as a paradigm for humanistic study. It will seek to demonstrate , however, that “in®uence,” as a special case of intertextuality, can still prove a useful academic rubric. Like nationality and period, in®uence simply needs to be rethought as variably constituted, variegated in its results, and variously intersecting other narratives. It must be seen as shorthand for a shifting array of intense demands and ardent desires, the parsing of which can lead a critic far a¤eld from old-style allusion hunts. Encounters between writers, after all, occur against an incredibly busy backdrop of texts, events, discourses, structures, and institutions. The stray, occasional linkups between authors A and B can serve as points de repère in a potential myriad of forays into and outside their respective writings. The point of such analysis, though, is not to understand cultures, societies, or history in toto—that level of abstraction is the domain of other methodologies—but rather to generate an illustrative blend of microhistory, micropolitics, poetics, and ethics. One witnesses why and how particular writers employ particular formal strategies and devices as they do. Such knowledge cannot license grandly inductive claims about traditions, cultures, or “main currents.” One can nonetheless amass suf¤ciently numerous cases to begin comparing and contrasting them and in the process succeed in sketching a historically speci¤c map of possible, if divergent, literary options and outcomes. This map can, in turn, be used to challenge or reinforce generalizations yielded by other, more statistical or theory-driven approaches. In line with this revised and narrowed sense of in®uence, the next three chapters investigate Hart Crane’s reception within a particular poetic community , the loosely af¤liated, mid-twentieth-century U.S. bohemian circles retrospectively known as the New American...