Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction

152 Pages·1989·8.648 MB·English

by  Warner Berthoff

Hart Crane
A RE-INTRODUCTION
This page intentionally left blank
Hart Crane
A R E - I N T R O D U C T I ON
Warner Berthoff
University of Minnesota Press • Minneapolis
Copyright ® 1989 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis MN 55414.
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Markham.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berthoff, Warner.
Hart Crane, a re-introduction.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Crane, Hart, 1899-1932—Criticism and interpre-
tation. I. Title.
PS3505.R272Z565 1989 811'.52 89-27832
ISBN 0-8166-1700-7
ISBN 0-8166-1701-5 (pbk.)
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
Contents
Preface vii
Chapter 1
"Your Strange
Steel-Sure
Abstractions" 3
Chapter 2
"The Freedom of
My Imagination" 28
Chapter 3
"A Poetry of
the Center" 57
Chapter 4
The Bridge:
"Too Impossible
An Ambition"? 83
Notes 113
Bibliography 127
Index 133
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
The poets whose art carries forward the passion and insistence of poetry itself
have their continuing life not simply in the written texts they relinquish to
history but, necessarily, in the reflective engagement of all who continue
reading them. What Auden wrote memorializing Yeats is no more than the
common and general case: the poet as he survives at all does effectively
"[become] his admirers." With the American poet Harold Hart Crane
(1899-1932) this confirming second life began remarkably early, dating from
the response of a few contemporaries and peers to a handful of short lyrics
written between 1921 and the winter of 1922-23. Within that favored and
quickly entitled American generation in literature perhaps only Hemingway
would write himself as abruptly and indelibly as Crane did, and with so spare
an initial accomplishment, into our century's determining literary record.
The "sentiment of something very important and uncommon at issue"
which the poet and critic Allen Grossman has described, in one of the most
challenging of recent studies, as running through the whole corpus of Crane
criticism surfaces in the earliest commentaries.1 "You are a genuine poet,"
Waldo Frank, ten years older, wrote to Crane in February of 1923, having in
hand no more than half a dozen of the poems that three years later would fill
out Crane's first book. "A passionate abstraction"—of such kind, moreover,
as could assimilate the stubbornest elements of modern metropolitan disor-
der—"takes the place in your work of the rhetoric, the clang-tricks, the an-
cient associations so usually found in verse even of the best sort."2 Waldo
Frank, we remember, was committed on principle to the promise of some cul-
vii
viii PREFACE
ture-wide reawakening to oppose the puritanic-pragmatical depredations, in
America, of a life-canceling industrial order; to us Frank's generous enthusi-
asm for any new symptom of recovered vitality may limit the value of his crit-
ical witness—which is why the judgment registered in Allen Tate's introduc-
tion to White Buildings, in 1926, carries a surer authority. "The most
distinguished American poetry of the age," Tate resoundingly declared; not
only an "ambitious" and distinctively "American" poetry but "the only
poetry I am acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand
manner."
The argumentative weight and force of Tate's dissatisfaction through the
1930s and 1940s with the totality of Crane's effort may well reflect a degree of
embarrassment at that sweeping early endorsement, as they reflect also the
uncertainties and frustrations of his own later progress in poetry. But Tate
never lost his conviction of the central importance of his difficult friend's dif-
ficult example. "Crane's poetry," he wrote in reviewing Philip Morton's crit-
ical biography in 1937, "has incalculable moral value: it reveals our defects in
their extremity." (In 1952, severity softened by the force and maturity of in-
telligence he found in a newly published collection of Crane's letters, Tate
returned to something like his original estimate: "By the time [Crane] was
twenty-five, he had written a body of lyric poetry which, for originality, dis-
tinction, and power, remains the great poetic achievement of his gener-
ation.")3 So, too, Yvor Winters, whose opinions trace an even wider arc of
approval and rejection, remained faithful enough to his original valuation of
Crane's extraordinary gift to continue writing about him as a major object
lesson and to preserve from the remorseless destruction of all other private
papers the forty-odd letters Crane had written him between 1926 and 1930 on
poetry generally and on his own, and Winters's, work in progress.
It would be Tate's best pupil in the generation following—the generation
of American poets who from the start had before them the whole body of
Crane's finished work and would subsequently, the most original among
them, grow secure enough in their own practice to dispute when necessary
the critical wisdom they were trained in—who continued to speak out for
Crane's exemplary importance. Robert Lowell's ventriloquistic elegy of 1953,
"Words for Hart Crane," holds to the lurid image of the poete maudit that
Crane's wretched later life and suicide had sealed in place: the "Shelley of
[his] age," in Lowell's words, bearing in addition, as both poet and homosex-
ual, Walt Whitman's native legacy of a profound double estrangement. But in
the Paris Review interview following, in 1961, Lowell's own energetic self-
recovery in Life Studies, the emphasis with Crane is on the realized power of
the poetry itself and on the performative maturity, the self-consummation, at
its heart. Lowell's later judgment is one that is at least untroubled—as Tate's
PREFACE ix
and Winters's could not be—by competitive anxieties and resentments, de-
clared or concealed, and by intrusive personal recollection:
. . . Crane is the great poet of that generation. He got out more than
anybody else ... he was at the center of things in the way that no
other poet was. All the chaos of his life missed getting sidetracked
the way other poets' did, and he was less limited than any other poet
of his generation. There was a fulness of experience. . . . The push
of the whole man is there.4
Academic reconsideration of Hart Crane, beginning in full flood the same
year as Lowell's Paris Review statement, has mostly taken as given this
premise of his work's uncommon importance. (Thus it is R. W. B. Lewis's
starting point, if not his argued thesis, in The Poetry of Hart Crane [1967],
that Crane is "one of the dozen-odd major poets in American history," and
Harold Bloom's emphatic contention, in the mishnaic essay "Hart Crane's
Gnosis" [1982], that he was "perhaps more gifted than any" in the central
American tradition in poetry.) Recent commentators have also found it easier
to acknowledge without speculative rancor the unevenness of the achieve-
ment represented in the editions of Crane's published and unpublished work
assembled by Waldo Frank in 1933 and by Brom Weber in 1966. They have
managed to account for his poetry's miscarriages and overreachings without
lowering the valuation implied simply in the concentrated attention it contin-
ues to receive.5
But it is much in the nature of Crane's poetic and the obscurities deriving
from its combination of intense compression and rapid interior self-com-
pounding that the mass of this newer critical scholarship has been explicative
and hermeneutic. In citing here the book-length studies by L. S. Dembo
(1960), Samuel Hazo (1963), Jean Guiguet (1965), R. W. B. Lewis (1967),
Herbert Leibowitz (1968), R. W Butterfield (1969), Sherman Paul (1972),
M. D. Uroff (1976), H. N. Nilsen (1980), Alfred Hanley (1981), Edward
Brunner (1985), Paul Giles (1986), and collections of essays edited by Alan
Trachtenberg (1982), David R. Clark (1982), and Harold Bloom (1986), I am
conscious of unjustly neglecting many other instructive monographs, chap-
ters, and essays. The substantial difficulties Crane's poetry presents to both
comprehension and judgment—and is from the first known to have pre-
sented—have had, however, one distracting consequence. They have pushed
to the margin what seems to me still the main point of interest with Crane: the
ordered flexibility and force of expressiveness, the specifically poetic amplifi-
cation, that Allen Tate's deliberated emphasis in 1926 and Robert Lowell's in
1961 propose as not only impressive and admirable for one poet to have
achieved but as broadly, categorically, exemplary. (In this regard the critical