Goodbye, Hart Crane...

Strange how these things happen.

I once counted Hart Crane among my dozen or so favorite American poets. Today I
pulled out my Complete Poems and Selected Letters and realized I no longer really
like Hart Crane's poetry...not even the hip-to-like Key West: An Island Sheaf.
Okay "Oh Carib Isle!" is one poem that still reads well. But it's all that
Baudelairean decadence set in a rather Conradian tropical setting that pulls that
one off, all those dark scintillations coming off his "Carbonic amulet / sere of
the sun exploded in the sea." Okay, it's more Rimbaudian than Baudelairean I
guess. Very much like Rimbaud's image of eternity as "the sea mixed with the sun."
(The "sun mixed with the sea" sounds a better translation to me, even if it's an
inversion.) And Crane does have that great image of the sea as "Samite sheeted and
processioned" (from "Voyages II").

And I suppose the pathos of "The Broken Tower" still resonates, if the poem on the
whole is a bit overwrought--a word that comes to mind for Crane's oeuvre in
general. Hoever, I can't deny that I find lines from that poem wholly memorable
and moving:

"And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice."

Crane (especially early Crane) is very French very often--bad French more often
than good French. If he had gone to the prose poetry form he might have really
exploded...if he had cast off the shackles of the metered line, since his skills
are amazingly forgetive. Iambic pentameter is heroin to Crane, however, and it's
what makes his vision so pale and sweaty...the clinging to verse tradition is
what's disgusting...like a French whore cuddling a poodle to prove she's well-
bred...

As a side note, check out Creeley's poem on Hart Crane (one of his very earliest
poems, I believe). It's very good....

Most of this poetry is ruined by the obsessively-manicured line. He seems to think

even enjambment a weakness. He writes these masonry-like lines that just irk me to
no fucking end, and now I realize how much White Buildings is a young man's book.
It has all the excesses: sentiment going over to sentimentality, abuse of
mythological images, abuse of religious images and archetypes, bombast going over
to meaninglessness all the time...the only poems which seem to hold some true
poetry and not spoil their own effects are the final poems, "At Melville's Tomb,"
and the multipartite "Voyages."

All Crane's best poems are about the sea. Ironic, huh?

Maybe it's just an inbred hatred of verse on my part....which is what White

Buildings is. It's all these versicles hanging like icicles flashing little bits
of sun. And you can sense the pernicious influence of awful French writers like oh
say, Henri Regnier....poets who were were A-list or B-list during their lifetime
who now will forever look upwards to a rapidly vanishing D-list. I'm speaking of
poems in White Buildings that feature manicured French gardens, parasols,
fountains--the poetically decorative. The poem for his grandmother and the poem
for a painter he admires are weak poems where one senses he was trying to write
for a larger audience. This explains why so many of his poems were so appreciated
in their time. There was a great love of florid, anemic love ballads after the
French and poems groomed like topiary in the magazines of the day.

Okay, I still like portions of The Bridge. Probably because he stops writing verse
and actually begins writing poetry. There he sort of opens up the field of the
language some, and he is actually seeing the city and the country and the horrible
ideology of America and embracing the freedom that is allowable within this
superstructure...usually a freedom associated with violence...like war...or
madness.

I shouldn't blame it all on verse, as poets like Stevens or Marianne Moore were
able to be prosodic geniuses and still make their language both timely and
timeless. Many other Modernists did too of course.

But Hart Crane died a young man. He obviously had a lot of developing to do, much
invention in him. He seemed able to appreciate some forward-thinkers in the little
of his criticism we have....but he also hearkened back to poets like
Swinburne...one senses he knew how fey some of the poetry he admired (and that
influenced him) really was, but he couldn't really get past the cachet it held for
him. His work is very much in love with literary romanticism.

He was critically punished for his best work, The Bridge...and that's probably
what broke his spirit.

from "Cape Hatteras" in The Bridge....

Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks

See scouting griffins rise through gaseous crepe
Hung low...until a conch of thunder answers
Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers,
Slit the sky's pancreas of foaming anthracite
Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon,--pilot, hear!
Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see
How from thy path above the levin's lance
Thous sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance
To reckon--as thy stilly eyes partake
What alcohol of space...!

The imaginative language of the Bridge is often filled with these poetic
apostrophes (these "thee"s and "thou"s) which really impact negatively on the
work's reception...all that staginess, the self-consciousness of poetry as a
stage. He was very conscious of writing a "monumental" work and that isn't always
good. And I believe words exclusive to poetic diction like "levin" (Poe liked this
word for a lightning bolt too) grate the ear when heard against the sort of
forgetive skill which characterizes his best lines. These affectations tarnish
otherwise fine lines everywhere.

Compare how dated most of Crane is to one of his mentors who came quite some time
before him: Walt Whitman. Much of Whitman seems much less dated...many more of
Whitman's pages possess the twin virtues of timeliness and timelessness. Of
course, Whitman just took free verse for granted, which I think gave him more free
play from the start. Crane's work (think of his oft-anthologized imagistic "North
Labrador" from WB) is often just perfectly timely, and not much else. Poems like
"North Labrador" have not aged well at all. Again, it's the mannerisms and
affectations of the debut-de-siecle, heavy albatrosses, which sink the poem. If
you think about it, some literary devices--like apostrophe, addressing unliving
phenomena or abstract qualities--(as Hart addresses the landscape in "North
Labrador") have almost come to seem insurmountably silly to the modern reader or
listener. Literary apostrophe is an example of a device comedians instantly seize
upon to lampoon poets: "O Coffee Pot, shining resplendent upon yon kitchen
island..."
It's hard to imagine any poet pulling off literary apostrophe today, unless we're
talking humorous poetry.

Okay, enough necrovilification. He's an interesting transition figure. His

influence would be most important not because he made formal prosodic or
conceptual innovations--that was left to poets like William Carlos Williams. And
these innovations were mostly innovations of subtraction or negation in the early
20th century...the free verse revolution, investigations of non-denotative, non-
referential modalities in language, or the introduction of chance elements to name
a few. Think of what Stein was writing at the same time as Crane, or other more
forward-looking poets. When measured against giants, Crane seems almost a literary
eccentric. But perhaps this is being too cruel, to measure his work against the
titans of Modernism. Crane's contribution lay in using language in proscribed
ways...virtually making catachresis his hallmark. His excesses were dizzyingly
imaginative in this regard (see above the line "Slit the sky's pancreas of foaming
anthracite."). He was inching his way towards surrealism but would be dead before
that movement really grew legs.

Dada had certainly made its mark, but one senses Hart Crane was just a bit too
well brought-up for that. Which is a pity, but it made its strong impact on poets
who were going to be much more important in the long run, many of the major
Modernists.

He wrote his own epitaph in "At Melville's Tomb." The last line reads, "This
fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."

And language does too....

The man drowned himself in the wrong sea. He had so much more freedom to explore.

This piece originally appeared on my blog Joe Brainard's Pyjamas. Feel free to
come visit and stay awhile! I put yr jammies out on the bed. Feel free to
reproduce this or any of my writings/visual art as long as you credit me and/or my
blog and as long as you aren't making any money off me, you scalawag! :-)