Reginald Shepherd at Hart Crane’s Grave

In September 2008, the poet Reginald Shepherd passed away after a long battle with cancer. He was only forty five years old, and he was at the height of his career. He had just published his fifth volume of verse, Fata Morgana (2007); a collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (2008); and a compilation titled Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (2008). A stint as a blogger at Poetryfoundation.org had also recently installed him as a prominent if controversial figure across the many divisive camps that make up the current American poetry scene.¹ It is too soon, of course, to speak with any confidence about Shepherd’s prospects for a lasting place in the American literary canon. Little has yet to be written about him in scholarly venues.² He was, however, a poet who had thought a great deal about his relation to poetic tradition:

My poetry operates within a literary tradition and a literary language to which I owe my formation as a writer, yet which is not “mine” (as a black gay man raised in Bronx housing projects) . . . This language, the language of Yeats and Stevens, Eliot and Hart Crane, has both made me possible as a writer and made being a writer an asymptote. It is a language to which I aspire in the act of writing it and being written by it (every writer is as much the tool of language as its wielder). Thus my relationship to my own language (simultaneously mine and not mine at all) is ambivalent, constantly haunted by the questions, “Can I truly speak this language? Can this language speak through me?” . . . It’s my intention to inscribe my presence into that language and that tradition, not to “subvert” it but to produce a place of possibility within it.

(“Narcissus”)

Shepherd’s reference here to “Yeats and Stevens, Eliot and Hart Crane” is telling: he chooses four famous white male modernists to serve as a synecdoche for the much longer list of English-language canonical poets to which he aspires to add his own name. Indeed, in his last years, Shepherd repeatedly turned to these Anglo American high modernists—his “primary forbears” (Orpheus 3)—to provide standards of value against which he measured (and generally found wanting) both the “aimless noodling” of the “self-identified avantgarde” (76) and the “self-righteous” reaffirmation of social divisions in “identity poetics” (42). Coming from a “black gay man raised in Bronx housing projects,” such arguments can sound peculiar. Why prefer a body of writing infamous for its hermeticism and elitism over poetry openly committed to utopian or other radical progressive causes?

Such a question is overhasty. It prejudges how aesthetics and politics intertwine, and it underestimates, too, Shepherd’s reservations concerning modernism’s excesses. As a first step toward thinking through his place in (and challenge to) United States literary history, this article explores his involvement with one of his favored precursors, Hart Crane, a poet whose “extravagances of language and vision . . . enthralled” him from adolescence onward (Orpheus 21). While perhaps not the greatest influence on Shepherd’s writings— Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot do all have equal or better claim to that distinction—Crane undeniably left a profound mark on his poetry, especially on his third and fourth books, Wrong (1999) and Otherhood (2003). By analyzing and contextualizing his most overt expression of filiation—the elegy “At the Grave of Hart Crane”—this essay will, however, show that Shepherd is anything but a complacent mouthpiece for tradition. In fact, he believes that “being written by . . . language” is a perilous process. While he agrees that writing good verse might require poets to channel predecessors and to let language play as it will, he also maintains that one’s very survival as an autonomous individual demands that submission to outside agents never becomes total. “My aim,” he once said, “is to rescue some portion of the drowned and drowning, always including myself” (Orpheus 188).

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In 1997 Shepherd published “At the Grave of Hart Crane” in the...