On poetic autonomy

Langdon Hammer’s Hart Crane and Allen Tate is an insightful and suggestive discussion of a vexed relationship whose private tensions and doublebinds had consequences that reached beyond the poets’ biographies into the course of poetic modernism as a whole. Each poet, in Hammer’s view, depended upon and wounded the other; each found it impossible either to reach an accommodation with the other or to disengage from him in favor of a more appreciative significant reader. Each replayed their quarrel in their relations with other poets, and each saw the cultural history of their time (and created that history) largely in terms defined against each other.

What’s more, each was aware that what was at stake between them was not merely a personal quarrel over gender identity and ideals of relationship prosecuted in poetic terms, but was also the working out of two intricately related but deeply incompatible visions of what poetry is finally about. The passion and intelligence of Hammer’s own thoughts on these poets’ quarrels about the imagination make his book not only a major contribution to the intellectual history of modernism but to poetics as well.

Although it is clear that Hammer finds Crane’s vision of the poet’s calling more attractive and promising than Tate’s, he is at pains to point out how intimately their visions depend upon each other: they are both poets who turned against the genteel traditions of the late nineteenth century, and who learned from, but rejected, the revolutionary examples of aestheticism and imagism. Both sought, in a hermetic speech, a way of recalling poetry to high purposes that at least partly defy expression, and they each attempted to define, in contradictory ways, those features of the poet’s vocation that give the poet special access to cultural values and a critical purchase upon them. Crane and Tate do not present absolutely alternative positions so much as opposite but mutually entangled developments of similar premises.

One way of describing the quarrel between the two poets is to see it as a contest over the nature of imagination and its relationship to culture. Quarrels over the institutional place of the poet, and over issues of sexual orientation, develop in ways so inextricably entangled with this quarrel over the imagination that it is easy to see that they stand in a metaphorical relationship to each other. At the same time it is very difficult to sort out which quarrel is the vehicle and which is the tenor. Hammer wisely resists the temptation to sort this out: what Crane’s sexual orientation meant to him was something he was able to make sense of only by discovering the meaning of his imaginative commitments; at the same time Tate could define Crane’s imaginative commitments only by seizing upon his sexual orientation and distinguishing it invidiously from his own. To deny the linkage is to deny that there is something bodily and erotic about imagination: if it does not have that (to paraphrase Whitman to Emerson), it has nothing. At the same time it is worth wondering whether the connections that seem so self-evident to the poets—between skepticism about a heroic theory of imagination and homophobia, for instance—need have the same necessity to us.

Tate, like Eliot, understands the modern poet to be caught in that crux between his or her private vision, which imagination continues to provide, and the poet’s public theme, that body of generally held, half-conscious assumptions in whose terms that vision may be articulated, which the poet can no longer count upon. Critical intelligence alone, he argues, cannot readjust vision and theme (as Arnold attempted) because poetic themes must arise from the life-world; they cannot be maintained only by argument but must also be experienced inwardly in some part of the sensibility beyond or beneath argument. But pure imagination also cannot readjust vision and theme (as Shelley or Whitman attempted) because imagination is private. However, the poet can still, by refusing half...