Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway

3. Minding the Gaps in Modernist Poetry

[ 78 ] ChAPter 3 MIndIng tHe gAPs In ModernIst PoetrY • • • • In the verse of Joyce Kilmer, Chester Firkins, and the other poets invested in the ideal of the subway sublime, the passenger’s orientation to the system parallels the believer’s relation to the divine: although neither person can perceive its object, each experiences flashes of wonder and peace that confirm its coherence. These middlebrow Catholic poets see the subway as a vehicle that counteracts the irreligious rationalism of their age; with its underground tunnels and complex pathways, the subway can be understood only through parallels and metaphors. By eschewing the transparency of the gear-and-girder world, the subway’s form nearly demands that educated passengers trade their expertise for an almost medieval faith in a sublime system. Although the chaos of the early twentieth-century city may suggest that ideals of order, beauty, and truth have fallen by the wayside, the magazinists discussed in chapter 2 propose that this view is merely a failure of imagination on the part of the city dweller. The city replicates the universe in miniature, and the view afforded by public transportation helps us see [ 79 ] Minding the Gaps in Modernist Poetry the mysteries of both. What happens to this model of coherence, then, when the sublime becomes routine? Avant-garde poetry of the 1910s and 1920s offers an alternate solution to the problem of technology as a medium for reading the city. Coherence is not presumed but rather hard-won from the buildup of knowledge gained through the everyday experiences of public transportation. Hart Crane, along with other modernist poets of this period, finds in the Babel of the subway crowd and repetition of commuting habits an alternative to transcendental meaning. Unlike the middlebrow verse writers of the 1910s, who glossed over the class differences of the subway crowd, Crane is particularly interested in examining the physical fragmentation experienced by working-class riders; his interest, however, is less political than formal. The broken repetitions seen in the movements and heard in the language of his fellow passengers model a form of engagement with literary predecessors that Crane carries out in his poem “The Tunnel.”1 In order to understand Hart Crane’s view of technology, one must begin with the body. Crane resists sublimity when discussing the relationship between technology and verse in his much-cited essay “Modern Poetry”: Contrary to general prejudice, the wonderment experienced in watching nose dives is of less immediate creative promise to poetry than the familiar gesture of a motorist in the modest act of shifting gears. I mean to say that mere romantic speculation on the power and beauty of machinery keeps it at a continual remove; it can not act creatively in our lives until, like the unconscious nervous responses of our bodies, its connotations emanate from within—forming as spontaneous a terminology of poetic reference as the bucolic world of pasture, plow, and barn. (171–72) Unlike his peers who have replaced the subway with the airplane as the technologically sublime vehicle of the day, Crane insists that the subway can function as a poetic subject only after it has been incorporated fully into everyday life. In early subway verse the machine itself is indeed kept at a “continual remove”; poetry of the 1920s, by contrast, abandons the “wonderment ” in favor of a focus on the “familiar gestures” associated with subway riding: dropping a nickel into a turnstile, squeezing into a crowded car, swinging on a strap. This suggests that the meaning of the subway becomes [ 80 ] CHAPTER THREE visible in the “unconscious nervous responses” of passengers accommodated to its mechanical routines. New York modernists can no longer separate themselves from the subway they write about, so deeply associated with urban space and culture has it become. Rather they consider how it has formed “a terminology of poetic reference” and shaped “the unconscious nervous responses of our bodies.” The understanding of the subway system, like the understanding of American poetry itself, moves away from a dependence on transcendental truths to provide coherence. Instead we see the subway deployed in service to a model of coherence like that of a collage or a cinematic montage, one in which the beholder must fill in the blanks and mind the gaps. Modernist poetry models the cognitive efforts of subway riders in a search for innovative means of expressing gaps between knowledge and feeling. In a period...