Hart Crane: After His Lights

1. How American

In the ¤rst decades of the twentieth century, many signi¤cant U.S. poets— among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—reacted strongly against the perceived excesses of late nineteenth-century poetry. These authors rejected the elegant, highly wrought poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites and the decadents, as well as the treacly sentimentality of mainstream verse, in order to embrace a more “natural” style in two senses of the word: ¤rst, they experimented with contemporary vernacular diction and speech patterns , and, second, they eschewed theatrical or inappropriate displays of emotion. Crane,however,chose a contrary path. He typically preferred ornate rhetoric to clean imagery, aureation to blunt Anglo-Saxon, and exaggeration to understatement. He disliked vers libre. He increased, not reduced, the gap between his conventionally rhymed-and-metered verse and the language of everyday speech. Simply put, he became a mannerist. He so supersaturated his poetry with the perceived vices of the late Victorian lyric that, like a viewer standing before such notorious late Renaissance works as Parmigianino ’s Madonna with the Long Neck (1534), his ¤rst readers were often unsure whether to snort, giggle, or be swept up in the passion and audacity of the masterful execution. Crane’s outrageous style has many stereotypically modernist aspects to it: obliquity, indirection, estrangement, and a concentration on the quiddity of its medium, language. Nevertheless, it also represents a bold departure in tone, affect, and temperament from the standard set by such chiseled, reticent , worldly works as Pound’s Lustra (1916), H.D.’s Sea Garden (1916), Williams ’s Spring and All (1923), Moore’s Observations (1924), and Eliot’s Pru1 How American frock and Other Observations (1917). Judged against this backdrop, the lush locutions employed throughout White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930) left Crane highly vulnerable to accusations of being old-fashioned— an especially worrisome charge, of course, in “the grand dissolution, birth control, re-swaddling and new-synthesizing, grandma-confusion movement” that was Crane’s immediate milieu, the early-century Greenwich Village literary avant-garde (O My 194). His frequent, fervent asseverations of being “only interested in adding what seems to me something really new to what has been written” (O My 70; emphasis in original) coexisted uneasily with an awareness that what he perceived as innovations would in all likelihood appear antiquated to his colleagues and contemporaries: “God DAMN this constant nostalgia for something always ‘new.’This disdain for anything with a trace of the past in it!!”(O My 117). When feeling insecure about the novelty of his verse, he tended to denounce the “mad struggle for advance in the arts” and defend his anomalous poetry as occupying its own special niche: “Every kind of conceivable work is being turned out. Period styles of every description . Isn’t it, after all, legitimate for me to write something the way I like to (for my own pleasure) without considering what school it harmonizes with?” (O My 87–88). In subsequent decades, many of Crane’s admirers have felt compelled to defend his anomalous style. Sans such a defense, Crane, the odd poet out, can appear stubbornly perverse, a poetaster who offers “a drunken candy world . . . poisonous at the center”(Sundquist 377). Langdon Hammer’s Hart Crane and Allen Tate (1993) labels this aspect of Crane’s poetics a “bravura” effort to revive the “high style” of ages past (198). Gérard Titus-Carmel’s L’élancement: Éloge de Hart Crane (1998) portrays it as a forerunner of the poststructuralist embrace of arti¤ciality. Shorthand explanations such as these, though, have failed to do justice both to the literary-historical speci ¤city and to the oddity of Crane’s ecstatic, excessive verse. A lyric such as “Atlantis” is too hyperbolic, too exaggerated, and too uneven to have been written by Christopher Marlowe or by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nor does “Atlantis ”exhibit the depthless play of surfaces celebrated by the Tel Quel circle. The lyric is just too embarrassingly sincere in its struggle to express the ineffable . The question of Crane’s aberrant writing style has yet to receive a fully satisfactory explanation because he has repeatedly been positioned within a literary-historical genealogy that tends to demote his peculiar formal excesses to a sideshow, a merely personal, even personable idiosyncrasy. Literary critics have consistently chosen to read Crane as an heir of the American 18 chapter 1 [3.138.118.250] Project MUSE (2024...