Professor Langdon
Hammer: Crane is a
challenge.
He's a challenge for you;
he's a challenge for me as a
teacher.
He's a challenging poet.
 
He challenges his reader.
 
He challenges us and he makes
invitations to us.
He calls to us in various ways,
places demands on us.
I'd like to talk about a text
I'm not, in fact,
holding.
Does somebody have an RIS
packet handy that I could have
in my hands?
Thank you, Jean.
And that is the poem "Legend,"
which is the poem placed first
in Crane's first and only book
of lyrics called White
Buildings.
It's a poem that he used to
introduce himself to the reader,
as it were.
So, why don't we use it to
begin thinking about his work:
As silent as a mirror is
believed
Realities plunge in silence
by...
The poem begins with a kind of
riddle or enigma,
and then the first person comes
forward:
I am not ready for
repentance;
Nor to match regrets.
For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame.
It's a wonderful idea:
"I'm not going to repent of
anything;
I'm not going to regret
anything.
I have not bent any more,
I have nothing more to regret
than the flame which has drawn
me, which bent as well."
For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame.
And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are,--[comma, dash]
The only worth all
granting.
 
 
Characteristically here,
for Crane, there's a compressed
set of images.
 
 
 
Those "tremorous white falling
flakes" there;
well, they're almost images,
aren't they,
of a burnt moth,
a moth that's been drawn to the
flame.
And then those come to be seen
as, here, kisses.
 
Kisses, if we unpack Crane's
odd syntax, it would seem--the
sentence would seem to read –
although it's maybe available to
other constructions – "kisses
are tremorous in the white
falling flakes."
But these kisses,
these kisses that are also
emblems of flame and of
extinction even,
are "the only worth all
granting";
that is, the only value that
seems to grant all,
I think.
Again those words,
"all granting," might be
construed in a couple of
different ways.
Crane says:
It is to be learned [what
is to be learned?]--
This cleaving and this burning
[the kind I'm talking
about]…
We must learn to be drawn to
the flame and we must learn to
recover from the flame and renew
our desires and renew our
quests.
It is to be learned--
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.
In order to do this,
you've got to spend yourself
repeatedly, over and over again.
And then he gives us other
images of this kind of repeated
burning:
Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!
["eidolon" is a Greek word for
"image"]) and yet again.
This activity is repeated and
repeated:
Until the bright logic is
won
Unwhispering [he returns to
that initial enigmatic image]
as a mirror
Is believed.
Then, drop by caustic drop,
a perfect cry
Shall string some constant
harmony,--
Relentless caper for all those
[and here we are challenged and
invited to
meet him and join him] who step
The legend of their youth into
the noon.
Well, it's a hard poem and yet
there are a few,
I think, simple,
basic ideas that it projects
that are important to the poet
that Crane saw himself as,
and the one he wants us to
receive and in a sense join.
He presents himself as an
unrepentant visionary,
Romantic, and lover – since,
after all, these roles are all
held in some association here.
 
He talks about here a
willingness that's erotic,
that's aesthetic,
that's spiritual;
to exhaust oneself in the
pursuit of one's desires;
to "spend out" yourself again
and repeatedly.
There is in this the promise
that by doing it repeatedly,
"drop by caustic drop," a kind
of lyric voice will emerge that
will be "a perfect cry."
 
And despite this destruction
and pain and blood,
"bleeding eidolon",
a "constant harmony "will be
achieved,
"harmony" invoking,
of course, more than one voice.
 
And what is this?
 
This is a poetic project,
and it's a project that he
describes as a "relentless
caper," a "relentless caper."
"Caper" comes from Latin,
in the sense of the goat that
leaps.
It's also a word that suggests,
well, some kind of minor
mischief: a "relentless caper
for all those who step / the
legend of their youth into the
noon."
And here, Crane presents
himself as a young person who
would project all of the
youthful vitality of his vision
and desire into this
symbolically pregnant moment
that he calls "the noon."
It's a time very important in
Crane's imagination,
I think: idiosyncratically,
individually,
but also in a way that alludes
to noon in Emily Dickinson's
poems;
Dickinson being a poet that
Crane shares a great deal with.
 
The poetry of Hart Crane--it
proposes to approach what he
calls "noon," which is an
experience of fullness and
absolute presence.
 
Now, what does he mean,
he's "not ready for
repentance"?
Who after all has told him to
repent?
 
 
 
Who has told him he has
something to regret?
"Repent" is something that
Crane heard from the culture at
large in important ways.
 
Crane is writing in the
mid-twenties,
or at this point.
 
I think this is a poem from
1924 or so.
It is post-war America.
 
Crane sees himself as a member
of a new youthful world,
centered in places like
Greenwich Village.
He sees himself as part of a
young America,
bound together across place by
a kind of common dedication to
art and to their will to free
themselves from the sexual and
economic disciplines that he
calls in this letter that I have
quoted other sentences from,
calls "Puritanism."
Crane is writing in an era,
the era of the Eighteenth
Amendment.
Prohibition is in effect.
There is a range of kinds of
censorship that are a real and
present threat.
James Joyce's novel
Ulysses has been banned
from the United States shores
for its obscenity.
 
There's a way in which
modernist art is mixed up with
questions of sexuality.
 
Crane got his copy of
Ulysses smuggled from
France, which a friend then
stole.
Crane is living,
too, in a vital and nascent gay
culture, in New York in
particular,
and yet within a nation,
then as now,
that is strongly homophobic and
anti-gay in all sorts of ways.
Crane's insistence on,
his refusal to repent,
his refusal to regret,
are assertions of his will
towards forms of sexual and
imaginative freedom.
They're also affirmations of a
Romantic poetics,
essential to him.
 
 
 
There's also a literary
historical context for this
that's important and that I
think you can probably already
start to guess at.
 
Crane is a deep and a deeply
ambivalent reader of The
Waste Land and T.S.
 
Eliot.
He says in this letter to
Gorham Munson in January 1923:
There's no one writing in
English who can command so much
respect, to my mind,
as Eliot.
However, I take Eliot as a
point of departure towards an
almost complete reverse of
direction.
His pessimism is amply
justified in his own case.
 
[Why? I don't know.
 
Well, Crane had his fantasies
about Eliot's sexual life,
I think.]
But I would apply as much of
his erudition and technique as I
can absorb and assemble toward a
more positive,
or if I must put it so in a
skeptical age,
ecstatic goal.
I should not think of this if a
kind of rhythm and ecstasy were
not at odd moments and rare a
very real thing to me.
I feel that Eliot ignores
certain spiritual events and
possibilities,
as real and powerful now as,
say, in the time of Blake.
 
[Blake is very important to
Crane.]
Certainly the man has dug the
ground and buried hope as deep
and direfully as it can ever be
done.
After this perfection of death
[which is what Crane is--this is
how he's reading The Waste
Land]
nothing is possible in motion
but a resurrection of some kind
[he says].
 
 
 
Crane is reading The Waste
Land and he's reading
Eliot's criticism.
 
He's responding to--well,
he's responding to a series of
texts, and I'll just show you
some of what he's reading here.
This is The Criterion,
the first place Eliot's poetry,
The Waste Land,
appeared.
That's in October 1922,
Eliot's own magazine.
The first American publication
of the poem was in The
Dial in November 1922,
and then the poem appeared in
– I don't know if you can see
that very well – the poem
appeared in a New York
publication in book form as its
own discreet text.
 
When the Liveright edition of
the poem was being prepared,
as I mentioned last time,
Eliot was asked to make the
poem a little longer,
because after all it was a
little too short,
and, or so the story goes,
this was in part one of his
motives for producing the notes
to the poem.
As I said last time,
this is the way the poem looked
in America when it first
appeared, and of course with
just a few lines per page.
Last time I called it the
shortest long poem in the
language.
You can see the way in which
it's sort of drawn out.
 
Here's the little section I
ended by talking about,
"Death by Water."
 
Well, as I suggested last time,
Eliot's notes suggested and
created a kind of role for the
poet where the poet was not only
the creative lyric presence at
the center of the poem but was
also a kind of scholar and
critic of his own work:
framing it,
mastering bodies of knowledge,
and arranging meaning in ways
that the notes emblematize.
In the process,
Eliot's doing a couple of
things that Crane is responding
to.
He is establishing himself in
what I described as a new role,
and that's very much the role
you see Eliot embodying here;
that is, the poet as a kind of
scholar poet,
a figure backed by
institutional authority of
various kinds.
And this figure's created
specifically in The Waste
Land through the poem's
turning away from and turning
against,
in complicated ways,
its own forms of Romanticism,
which last time I suggested
were emblematized by that
drowned Phoenician sailor,
Phlebas, who is a kind of
figure for what the poem
sacrifices or,
you might say,
a kind of version of the self
that Eliot is willing to give
up.
Crane, encountering the poem,
I think, must have been
obsessed with the section,
"Death by Water"--must have
seen, must have heard Eliot
talking to him when Eliot says,
"Consider Phlebas who was once
handsome and tall as you."
Crane means to reassert the
power of youth,
reassert the potential for
Romantic vision,
and to do so in a way that he
imagines as a kind of
resurrection and,
specifically,
as a kind of passage through
and beyond "Death by Water."
Drowning is an important
imaginative motif in Crane's
work.
The poems that I'll concentrate
on now to explore this idea all
have images of romance quest and
drowning at their center.
 
And I mean, first of all,
the very great love poem called
"Voyages" on page 609,
which Eliot or--excuse me,
which Crane began in the spring
of 1924, about a year after he's
read The Waste Land.
 
And the poem is,
I think, his first sort of
developed reply,
and it centers,
as I say, on images of
drowning.
The poem arises from a love
affair with, as it happens,
a Danish sailor who was part of
the Bohemian crowd around the
Provincetown Players in
Greenwich Village.
Crane's letters are full of
both reflections on Eliot and
also ecstatic and very moving
accounts of his love affair with
Emil Opffer.
I'll read you just a few
sentences from one letter to his
friend, Waldo Frank.
He says--Crane does:
It will take many letters
to let you know what I mean,
for myself at least,
when I say in this relationship
that I have seen the Word made
flesh.
I mean nothing less.
And I know now that there is
such a thing as
indestructibility,
in the deepest sense where
flesh became transformed through
intensity of response to
counter-response,
where sex was beaten out,
where a purity of joy was
reached that included
tears.
Now, imagery from this and
other letters that Crane wrote
during the period emerge in
"Voyages."
The very first section of
"Voyages" had been,
in fact, sitting on Crane's
desk for three years:
Above the fresh ruffles
of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay
each other with sand.
 
They have contrived a conquest
for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble
fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
 
And in answer to their treble
interjections
The sun beats lightning on the
waves,
The waves fold thunder in the
sand;
And could they hear me I would
tell them:
O brilliant kids,
frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks,
bleached
By time and the elements;
but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever
trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to
caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too
wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is
cruel.
The poem begins on shore,
begins with kids playing.
Their play in all its innocence
seems to imply and gesture
towards ferocious energies that
are emblematized by the sea in
all of its thunder and lightning
and power.
They fondle, they flay.
 
The shoreline is a place where
there are fragments of debris,
proof of the sea's force.
 
The poem begins with a simple
moral injunction or,
really, a practical warning.
 
To give yourself over to the
sea would be to enter a field of
unbounded energy,
to risk your identity,
to risk being overwhelmed.
 
Think of Prufrock,
on the shore,
"shall I wear my trousers
rolled?"
Crane is there,
in the same place,
and having issued this warning,
having acknowledged the cruelty
of the bottom of the sea,
he throws it off and throws it
behind, and enters the water:
-- And yet [that
important piece of Cranian
punctuation, the dash--a bit
of punctuation that separates
and connects elements--pushes
that
warning away and takes us into
the sea]
this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods,
become borderless space,
unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned
where
Her undinal vast belly…
Crane images the sea here as a
woman's body and as a kind of
belly that bends towards the
moon.
It's a kind of vision of the
open horizon of the sea as,
you know, it seems to project
the curve of the earth in it.
Her undinal vast belly
moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections
of our love;
That's a wonderful Cranian
word, "wrapt."
It would seem to mean both
"wrapped," in the sense of
"wrapped up," and "rapt," in the
sense of "held in rapture."
He's kind of combined,
possibly through error,
these two forms.
Crane makes errors.
He's unlike the scholarly Eliot.
 
He continues,
and now gives us instructions:
Take this Sea,
whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy
sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose
session rends
As her demeanors motion well or
ill,
All but the pieties of lovers'
hands.
Here, being in the space of the
sea is like being in love or in
the act of love,
as Crane imagines it.
It's also like being in a
fabulous rhetorical world:
a space of gorgeous extravagant
language,
which Crane unleashes here in
all of its terrific force.
Its language,
which is iambic pentameter,
unlike Eliot,
is a language as rich and
ornate as on the English
Renaissance stage.
Marlowe would have liked this.
 
It is also a kind of Romantic
diction, and there are elements
of a sort of late
nineteenth-century British and
French poetry that Crane is
combining here.
He says:
And onward,
as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of
the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of
her tides,--
Adagios of islands,
O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions
her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders
wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless
rich palms
Pass superscription of bent
foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true
[because they will not be true
forever],--
sleep, death desire,
Close round one instant in one
floating flower.
Crane understands that love,
like rhetoric,
casts a spell,
and that love and poetry create
illusions.
He does not therefore despise
them;
different from Eliot,
in a basic way.
He acknowledges,
as it were, the temporariness
of his desire.
In fact he says:
Bind us in time,
O Seasons clear,
and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib
fire,
What are "minstrel galleons of
Carib fire"?
Well, maybe they're actual
ships that he's imagining
passing among.
Maybe they are the lights of
the moon or sun on the sea.
He says to the sea:
Bequeath us [I know we're
going to die]
to no earthly shore [in other
words, "don't bury us"]
until [and as in legend,
Crane produces a funny,
syntactic reversal here]
Is answered in the vortex of
our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze
toward paradise.
There the subject of the
sentence comes last.
The sentence is:
"The seal's wide spindrift gaze
is answered in the vortex of our
grave."
What Crane has done there is:
he's reversed the syntactic
order of subject and verb.
 
By doing so,
he's introduced first the image
of death by drowning – that
is, the vortex of our grave –
and he's put that up first;
and then, he's followed it with
the image of the seal's gaze,
which comes and emerges after
drowning.
The seal is here a figure of a
kind of consciousness and desire
expressed through the eyes that
survives death.
Look back to the poem
preceding, called "At Melville's
Tomb."
Here this is an elegy for
Melville which seems to presume,
falsely, that Melville was
drowned, and is not buried on
shore, as he is.
And there's an image again of
drowning in lines 11 and 12,
and again an image of a vortex:
Then in the circuit calm
of one vast coil [after the
storm that has wrecked the
ship],
Its lashings charmed [and those
lashings remind you of the
flayings of
the kids in "Voyages"]
and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that
lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across
the stars.
How do eyes lift altars?
In Crane's letter to Harriet
Munroe, in defense of this poem
and what he calls "the logic of
metaphor,"
Crane says, well,
eyes lift altars in the sense
that they bring the object of
their desire into being through
their desire;
that is, you raise the altar,
you create the object of
worship through your yearning
for it.
This is, again,
a kind of visionary act,
and it's a version of the one
that we find at the end of the
second section of "Voyages"
where we see the
seagull's--excuse me,
"the seal's wide spindrift gaze
toward paradise."
"Wide."
"Wide" because it's a gaze that
is large and takes in much
space;
"wide" because the sea is a
kind of space in which we have
latitude of action.
 
"Spindrift":
it's a word that Crane took
from Moby Dick,
from Melville,
replacing another word – not
such a good word – which also
came from Moby Dick:
"finrinny."
It's good he got rid of that.
 
"Spindrift" is important.
 
When you are in the sea,
it is like being in a Crane
poem.
You don't have the ground under
your feet.
You spin and you drift;
you spin and you drift and
words mix and match and create
words like "spindrift."
 
This is a condition that Crane
calls, in the next poem,
"infinite consanguinity,"
where there's a kind of sharing
of elements, a kind of
transformation through exchange
that goes on.
This is understood as what
happens in love.
It's also understood as a kind
of model for poetic process.
 
It's imaged here in this poem
in triumphant language as a kind
of transcendence of death.
 
Here, describing a moment of
climactic intensity,
Crane writes:
And so,
admitted through black swollen
gates
That must arrest all distance
otherwise,--
Past whirling pillars and lithe
pediments,
Light wresting there
incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave
on wave unto
Your body rocking!
 
and where death,
if shed [like a skin],
Presumes no carnage [no final
death of the body],
but [rather]
this single
change,--
Upon the steep floor flung from
dawn to dawn
The silken skilled
transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage,
love, into your hands…
"The silken skilled
transmemberment of song":
this is Crane's final,
fantastic line of iambic
pentameter,
where he proclaims a kind of
transformation that is at once
erotic and rhetorical,
where elements between two
parties have been exchanged and
reversed just as the "silk" and
"skill" give us phonemes that
are held in almost a kind of
mirror relationship and
alliteration:
the i-l-k,
k-i-l.
And then Crane introduces us to
another word that he coins:
"transmemberment."
 
"Transmemberment":
what does "transmemberment"
mean?
It seems to be made out
of--what?
Remember,
dismember,
transformation.
He's talking about a kind of
activity that involves all these
things at once,
and through it achieves a kind
of vision of union,
which is again,
as I say,
both linguistic and
interpersonal.
Well, that seems like a good
place to stop for now.
 
We'll carry these poems on as a
way to read his long poem in
reply to The Waste Land
– The Bridge.
