Hart Crane: After His Lights

2. How Queer

Illustrating Crane’s adherence to Victorian verse norms usefully transgresses hoary disciplinary lines by demonstrating the need to think about modern U.S. poetry in a transatlantic context. Such a gesture is, however, in itself unlikely to win the poet new admirers, whether in or out of the academy. Whatever its national origins or af¤liations, Crane’s anomalous writing style remains vulnerable to accusations of being meretricious, self-indulgent, or even reactionary. To reply to such charges means ¤nding a way to attribute signi¤cance to Crane’s démodé Swinburnian leanings, a task which, in essence , requires that one supply a frame that could situate this story within broader narratives or debates. Crane’s decision to opt out of the Pound Era provides a useful starting point. Crane’s dissent appears gauche, inexplicable, or conservative only if one buys into the Poundian narrative of poetic progress from Victorian “sissi ¤ed fussiness” to Imagist clarity to Vorticist kinetics.1 Since the early 1990s there has been a growing consensus that the conventional, oft-repeated narratives of modernist formal experimentation and breakthrough—the sort of narrative enshrined in such classics as Pound’s How to Read (1931), Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971), and Christopher Beach’s ABC of In®uence (1992)—have frequently concealed as much or more than they reveal. Scholarly attention has shifted toward the investigation of what Andreas Huyssen, following Dilip Gaonkar, calls “alternative modernities,” that is, “trajectories ,” “relations,” and “crosscurrents” of thought and development that have always existed alongside canonical modernism but that have, up to now, rarely received extended scrutiny from metropolitan academics (367). In opposing his poetics to Pound’s, Crane could have been asserting himself as 2 How Queer differently modern, that is, as a writer whose modernity proceeds from different principles toward different ends. In the past, critics have commonly contended that Crane’s poetics are unusual , even unique, because of his sexual orientation. Thomas Yingling, for instance, asserts that Crane, as a homosexual poet, could not write like his straight counterparts. Instead he penned “homotextual” verse informed through and through by his queerness. This line of argument could have led to repositioning Crane as a participant in an “alternative modernity”worthy of celebration, scrutiny, or critique. Unfortunately, most efforts at “queering ” his poetry—whether it be by Yingling, Merrill Cole, Langdon Hammer, Robert K. Martin, or Christopher Nealon—have presented him in relative isolation from his queer contemporaries. Insofar as Crane appears as part of a group, he does so either within an eclectic, cross-period miscellany of gay writers (alongside the likes of Whitman, Wilde, Rimbaud, Auden, Ginsberg, Merrill, and Ashbery) or as a homosexual loner within a predominantly straight male clique (Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Matthew Josephson, and Gorham Munson). Little effort has been made to understand Crane’s mannerist poetics as a speci¤cally 1910s and ’20s queer-in®ected response to the writings of his straight, more straitlaced friends and rivals. This lapse arguably stems from a long-overdue comparison between Crane and the female authors of his day. Rarely if ever have Crane’s writings been read in tandem with gender-bending and sexually transgressive works by the likes of Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein.2 A wealth of recent scholarship on these women writers, however, can help one contextualize Crane’s otherwise perplexing, idiosyncratic formal choices. Barnstorming Over the last decade, an “alternative modernity” that has gained particular academic prominence is “Sapphic modernism.” Erin Carlston has concisely summarized its emergence as a literary category. During the ¤rst stage, feminists challenged the exclusion of women from the canon of modernist writers studied and taught in the academy: In the early 1980s, feminist literary critics began to call into question the characterization of the modernist canon . . . as that body of experimental writing produced by a group of expatriate men between about the turn of the century and World War II. Feminists argued that this androcentric vision of literary modernism distorted a history in which women had in fact been central, as authors, critics, editors, 40 chapter 2 and publishers; they rediscovered the work of long-neglected women writers . . . like Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Mina Loy. Certain feminist scholars then proceeded to make a bolder claim: “the politics and thematics of gender and sexuality” had not only shaped decades of syllabi but had in fact “played a formative role...