A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows
Superior of doors._
EMILY DICKINSON
a.
Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both the fruit and the
carrier of what I have called elsewhere “the great tradition.”[3] This
tradition rose in the Mediterranean world with the will of Egypt, Israel
and Greece, to re-create the individual and the group in the image of
values called divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and
when it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national
European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived in the
Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With the Puritans, it
was formally transplanted to the North American seaboard. Roger
Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards; later, Jefferson, Madison,
Adams, carried on the great tradition with the same tools, on the same
intellectual and economic terms, that had been brought from Europe and
that had failed in Europe. It was transplanted, it was not transfigured.
But before the final defeat of the Puritan avatar—a defeat ensured by
the disappearance of our agrarian economy—the great tradition had borne
fruit in two general forms. The first was the ideological art of what
Lewis Mumford calls the Golden Day: a prophetic art of poets so diverse
as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, whose vision was one of Possibility and whose
doom, since its premise was a disappearing world, was to remain
suspended in the thin air of aspiration. The second was within the lives
of the common people. Acceptance of the great tradition had its effect
upon their character; and this humbler achievement is recorded, perhaps
finally, in the poems of Robert Frost.
Frost’s record (“North of Boston,” 1914; “Mountain Interval,” 1916) was
already made when the United States entered the War; and the War brought
final ruin to the American culture of “free” individuals living for the
most part on farms, whose beauty Frost recorded. The tradition which had
tempered the persons in Frost’s poems had already, before the Civil War,
sung its last high word in the old terms that were valid from Plato to
Fichte. And this, too, was fitting, for the Civil War prepared the doom,
which the World War completed, of the agrarian class culture. But the
great tradition, unbroken from Hermes Trismegistus and Moses, does not
die. In a society transfigured by new scientific and economic forces, it
must be transfigured. The literature and philosophy of the past hundred
years reveal many efforts at this transfiguration: in this common
purpose, Nietzsche and Marx are brothers. The poetry of Whitman was
still founded on the substances of the old order. The poetry of Hart
Crane is a deliberate continuance of the great tradition in terms of our
industrialized world.
If we bear in mind this purpose of Crane’s work, we shall be better
prepared to understand his methods, his content, his obscurity. We
shall, of course, not seek the clear forms of a poet of Probability,
like Frost. But we shall also not too widely trust Crane’s kinship with
the poets of the Emersonian era, whose tradition he immediately
continues. They were all, like Crane, bards of possibility rather than
scribes of realization. Yet they relied upon inherited forms—forms
emotional, ethical, social, intellectual and religious, transplanted
from Europe and not too deliquescent for their uses. Whitman’s
apocalypse rested on the politics of Jefferson and on the economics of
the physiocrats of France. Emerson was content with the ideology of
Plato and Buddha, his own world not too radically differing from theirs.
Even Emily Dickinson based her explosive doubts upon the permanent
premise of a sheltered private garden, to which such as she could always
meditatively retire. These traditional assumptions gave to the poets of
the Golden Day an accessible, communicable form; for we, too, have been
nurtured on the words of that old order. But in Crane, none of the ideal
landmarks, none of the formal securities, survive; therefore his
language problem—the poet’s need to find words at once to create and to
communicate his vision—is acute. Crane, who began to write while Frost
was perfecting his record, lived, instinctively at first, then with
poignant awareness, in a world whose inherited outlines of person,
class, creed, value—still clear, however weak, in Emerson’s Boston,
Whitman’s New York, Poe’s Richmond—had dissolved. His vision was the
timeless One of all the seers, and it binds him to the great tradition;
but because of the time that fleshed him and that he needed to substance
his vision, he could not employ conventional concretions. In his lack of
valid terms to express his relationship with life, Crane was a true
culture-child; more completely than either Dickinson or Blake, he was a
child of modern man.
b.
Harold Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, July 21, 1899. His
parents, Clarence Arthur Crane and Grace Hart, were of the pioneer stock
that trekked in covered wagons from New England to the Western Reserve.
But his grandparents, on both sides, had already shifted from the farm
to small-town business, and Clarence Crane, who had inherited his
father’s general store in Garrettsville, became a wealthy candy
manufacturer in Cleveland. Here the poet, an only child, lived from his
tenth year. At thirteen, he was composing verse; at sixteen, in the
words of Gorham Munson, “he was writing on a level that Amy Lowell never
rose from.” In the winter of 1916, he went with his mother, who was
separated from her husband, to the Isle of Pines, south of Cuba, where
his grandfather Hart had a fruit ranch; and this journey, which gave him
his first experience of the sea, was cardinal in his growth. The
following year, he was in New York, in contact with Margaret Anderson
and Jane Heap, editors of “The Little Review”; tutoring for college;
writing; already passionately and rather wildly living.
At this time, two almost mutually exclusive tendencies divided the
American literary scene. One was centered in Ezra Pound, Alfred
Kreymborg, the imagists, Harriet Monroe’s “Poetry” and “The Little
Review”: the other was grouped about “The Seven Arts.” Young Crane was
in vital touch with both. He was reading Marlowe, Donne, Laforgue,
Rimbaud; but he was also finding inspiration in Whitman, Sherwood
Anderson and Melville. His action, when the United States lurched into
the war, reveals the complexity of his interests. He decided not to go
to college and by his own choice returned to Cleveland, to work as a
common laborer in a munition plant and a shipyard on the lake. He loved
machines, the earth tang of the workers. He was no poet in an ivory
tower. But also he loved music; he wanted time to write, to meditate, to
read. The conflict of desires led him, perhaps, to accept what seemed a
comfortable compromise: a job in the candy business of his father.
The elder Crane seems to have been a man of turbulent and twisted power,
wholly loyal to the gods of Commerce. He was sincerely outraged by the
jest of fortune which had given him a poet for a son. Doubtless, he was
bitter at his one child’s siding with the mother in the family conflict.
But under all, there was a secret emotional bond between the two, making
for the ricochet of antagonism and attraction that lasted between them
until the father’s death, a year before the son’s. The candy magnate set
laboriously to work to drive the “poetry nonsense” out of his boy. Hart
became a candy salesman behind a counter, a soda-jerker, a shipping
clerk. He received a minimum wage. Trusted employees were detailed to
spy on him, lest he read “poetry books” during work hours. Hart Crane
escaped several times from the paternal yoke, usually to advertising
jobs near home or in New York. And at last, in 1920, he decided to break
with both Cleveland and his father.
His exquisite balance of nerves was already permanently impaired. The
youthful poet, who had left a comfortable household to live with
machines and rough men, who had shouldered “the curse of sundered
parentage,” who had tasted the strong drink of literature and war,
carried within him a burden intricate and heavy—a burden hard to hold in
equilibrium. Doubtless the chaos of his personal life led him to
rationalize the accessible tangent ease from the strain of balance which
excess use of alcohol invited. Yet there was a deeper cause for the
disequilibrium which, when Crane was thirty-two, was finally to break
him from his love of life and to destroy him. Hart Crane was a mystic.
The mystic is a man who _knows_, by immediate experience, the organic
continuity of his self with the cosmos. This experience, which is the
natural fruit of sensitivity, becomes intense in one whose native energy
is great; and lest it turn into an overwhelming, shattering burden, it
must be disciplined and ordered. A stable nucleus within the self must
be achieved, to bear and finally transfigure the world’s impinging
chaos. Personally, Crane did not win this synthesis.
But the poet was clearer and shrewder than the man. His mind sought a
poetic principle to integrate the exuberant flood of his impressions.
The early poems, collected in “White Buildings” (1926), reveal the
quest, not the finding. Allen Tate, in his Introduction to this volume,
writes: “The poems ... are facets of a single vision; they refer to a
central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the
motive of the poetry and the form of its realization.” But the central
imagination, wanting a unitary principle, wavers and breaks; turns back
upon itself instead of mastering the envisaged substance of the poem.
That is why, often, a fragmentary part of a poem is greater than the
whole: and why it is, at times, impossible to transpose the series of
images into the sense-and-thought sequence that originally moved the
poet, and that must be perceived in order to move the reader. The
mediate principle, coterminous with the image logic of the poem and the
feeling logic of the poet, is imperfect. The first lines of the volume:
As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by....
are a superb expression of chaos and of the poet’s need to integrate
this chaos in the active mirror of self. Page after page, “realities
plunge by,” only ephemerally framed in a mirroring mood which alas!
melts, itself, into the turbulent procession. Objective reality exists
in these poems only as an oblique moving-inward to the poet’s mood. But
the mood is never, as in imagist or romantic verse, given for and as
itself. It is given only as an organic moving-outward toward the
objective world. Each lyric is a diapason between two integers of a
continuous whole. But the integers (subjective and objective) are almost
never clear. This makes of the poem an abstract, wavering, esthetic
body. There is not yet, as in the later work, a conscious substantiated
theme or principle of vision to stratify the interacting parts of the
poems into an immobile whole.
But in the final six lyrics of this volume (“Voyages”) there is the
beginning of a synthesis. Its symbolic theme is the Sea. The turbulent
experience of Crane’s childhood and youth is fused in a litany to the
Sea.
... Sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
The sea, first source of life, first Mother, is death to man. To woo it
is to return to death’s simple singleness. This solution from the burden
of chaos is like the erotic mysticism of D. H. Lawrence. Immersion—hence
loss—of the burdened mystic self in perfect sexual union is a romantic
myth, old as the myth of the Sea. It satisfied Lawrence. But Crane was
intellectually too strong, and too robust an artist, to abide it. “White
Buildings” closes on the unitary theme of surrender. But the poet is
ready to begin his quest again.
In 1924, the poems of “White Buildings” written but not yet published,
Crane was living in Brooklyn, in range of the harbor, the Bridge, the
sea-sounds....
Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog horns....
And now, the integrating theme came to him.
The will of Crane in “The Bridge” is deliberately mythmaking. But this
will, as we have seen, is born of a desperate, personal need: the mystic
_must_ create order from the chaos with which his associative genius
overwhelms him. The poem retains this personal origin. The revelation of
“The Bridge,” as principle and myth, comes to an individual in the
course of his day’s journey; and that individual is the poet. In this
sense. “The Bridge” is allied to the “Commedia” of Dante, who also, in
response to desperate need, takes a journey in the course of which his
need finds consummation.
Lest the analogy be misleading, I immediately amend it. Dante’s cosmos,
imaged in an age of cultural maturity, when the life of man was
coterminous with his vision, contains time and persons: only in the
ecstatic last scenes of the “Paradiso” are they momently merged and
lost. Therefore, the line of Dante’s poem is clear, being forth and back
in time: and the focus of the action is cogent, being the person of the
Poet with whom the reader can readily graph points of reference. Crane’s
cosmos has no time and his person-sense is vacillant and evanescent.
Crane’s journey is that of an individual unsure of his own form and lost
to time. This difference at once clarifies the disadvantageous esthetic
of “The Bridge” as compared with that of broadly analogous poems of
spiritual search, like the “Commedia” or “Don Quixote.” It exemplifies
the role played by the cultural epoch in the creation of even the most
personal work of genius.
In “Proem,” the poet exhorts the object of his choice—the Bridge. It
shall synthesize the world of chaos. It joined city, river and sea; man
made it with his new hand, the machine. Parabola-wise, it shall now
vault the continent, and, transmuted, reach that inward heaven which is
the fulfillment of man’s need of order. Part One, “Ave Maria,” is the
vision of Columbus, mystic navigator who mapped his voyage in Isaiah,
seeking to weld the world’s riven halves into one. But this Columbus is
scarcely a person; he is suffused in his history and his ocean; his will
is more substantial than his eye. Nor does he live in time. Part Two,
“Powhatan’s Daughter” (the Indian princess is the flesh of America, the
American earth, and Mother of our dream), begins the recital of the
poet’s journey which traces in extension (as Columbus gives in essence)
the myth’s trajectory. The poet awakes in his room above the harbor,
beside his lover. Risen (taking the harbor and the sea-sounds with him),
he walks through the lowly Brooklyn streets: but walks with his cultural
past: Pizarro, Cortés, Priscilla, and now Rip Van Winkle whose eyes,
fresh from sleep, will abide the poet’s as they approach the
transfigured world of today. The poet descends the subway that tunnels
the East River (the Bridge is above); and now the subway is a river
“leaping” from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate. A river of steel rails at
first, bearing westward America’s urban, civilization (“Stick your
patent name on a signboard”) and waking as it runs the burdened trudge
of pioneers and all their worlds of factory and song. The patterning
march of the American settlers traces the body, gradually, of
Pocahontas; the flow of continent and man becomes the Great River; the
huge travail of continental life, after the white man and before him, is
borne southward, “meeting the Gulf.” Powhatan’s daughter, America’s
flesh, dances and the flesh becomes spirit. Dances the poet’s boyhood
memories of star and lake, of “sleek boat nibbling margin grass”; dances
at last into the life of an Indiana mother, home from a frustrate trek
to California for gold, who is bidding her son farewell; he is going
east again to follow the sea. (“Write me from Rio.”)
There are no achieved persons in the universe, barely emergent from
chaos, of Hart Crane; and this first crystallization—the prairie
mother—is the first weak block in the poem’s structure. Now, with Part
Three, “Cutty Sark,” the physical course of the poet (the subway ride
has exploded into the cosmic implication of the River) returns to view,
but blurred. The poet is in South Street, Manhattan, near midnight: he
is carousing with a sailor who brings him in snatches of song Leviathan,
Plato, Stamboul—and a dim harbinger of Atlantis. “I started walking home
across the Bridge”: there, in the hallucinatory parade of clippers that
once winked round the Horn “bright skysails ticketing the Line,” the
poet is out again, now seaward.
Part Four, “Cape Hatteras,” is the turning point of the poem. Thus far,
we have seen the individual forms of the poet’s crowded day melt into
widening, deepening cycles of association. Columbus into the destiny and
will of the Atlantic: two lovers into the harbor, the harbor into the
sea: subway into a transcontinental railroad, into a continent, into a
River; the River into the Gulf; the Indian princess into the Earth
Mother, and her dance into the tumult and traffic of the nation; ribald
South Street into a vision—while the Bridge brings the clippers that
bring China—of Atlantis. Now, the movement turns back toward
crystallization. “Cape Hatteras” at first invokes the geologic age that
lifted the Appalachians above the sea; the cosmic struggle sharpens into
the birth of the airplane—industrial America; the “red, eternal flesh of
Pocahontas” gives us, finally, Walt Whitman. “Years of the Modern!
Propulsions toward what capes?” The Saunterer on the Open Road takes the
hand of the poet. Parts Five and Six are interludes. Part Seven, “The
Tunnel,” carries the poem to its climax. The poet, in mid-air and at
midnight, leaves the Bridge; he “comes down to earth” and returns home
as he had left, by subway. This unreal collapse of bridge into subway
has meaning. The subway is the tunnel. The tunnel is America, and is a
kind of hell. But it has dynamic direction. In this plunging subway
darkness, appears Poe:
And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns...?
If the reader understand Poe, he will understand the apparition. Of all
the classic poets of the great tradition in America, Poe—perhaps the
least an artist—was the most advanced, the most prophetic, as thinker.
All, as we have noted, were content more or less with the merely
transplanted terms of an agrarian culture. Only Poe guessed the
transfiguring effect of the Machine upon the forms of human life, upon
the very concept of the person. The Tunnel gives us man in his
industrial hell which the machine—his hand and heart—has made; now let
the machine be his godlike hand to raise him! The plunging subway shall
merge with the vaulting bridge. Whitman gives the vision, Poe—however
vaguely—the method. The final part, “Atlantis,” is a transposed return
to the beginning. The Bridge, in time, has linked Atlantis with Cathay.
Now it becomes an absolute experience. Like any human event, _fully
known_, it links man instantaneously, “beyond time,” with the Truth.
The principle that Crane sought, to make him master of his sense of
immediate continuity with a world overwhelmingly chaotic, gave him “The
Bridge”; but in actual life it did not sustain him. The later poems,
despite their technical perfection (and with the exception of “The
Broken Tower”), mark a retreat to the mood of the last pages of “White
Buildings.” The Sea, symbol of the return to a unity of personal
abolition, had ebbed while the poet stood upon his mythic bridge; now
again it was rising. The periodicity of his excesses grew swifter; the
lucid intervening times when he could write were crowded out. Crane went
to Mexico, where individual extinction has for a thousand years inspired
a cult and a culture. On his return to New York, heart of the chaos in
his life, there was the Sea; and he could not resist it. As his boat was
bearing him from the warm waters which fifteen years before had given
him a symbol, he took off his coat, quietly, and joined the Sea forever.
c.
The beauty of most of Crane’s lyrics, and of many passages of “The
Bridge,” seems to me to be inviolable. If I analyze this conviction, I
am brought first to the poetic texture. Its traditional base is complex.
Here is a music plainly related to the Elizabethan poets. And here,
also, is a sturdy lilt like the march of those equal children of the
Elizabethans—the pioneers. Although Crane describes a modern cabaret ...
Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
Glee shifts from foot to foot ...
always, there is the homely metronomic, linking him to his fathers.
Hence the organic soundness of his verse. Its _livingness_ it owes to
the dimension of variant emergence from the traditional music, like the
emergence of our industrial world from the base of old America. The
entire intellectual and spiritual content of Crane’s verse could be
derived from a study of his typical texture. And this is earnest of its
importance.
The structural pattern of “The Bridge” is superb: a man moves of a
morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, returns at midnight, each stage of
his course adumbrating by the mystic law of continuity into American
figures with cosmic overtones, and all caught up in a mythic Bridge
whose functional span is a parabola, and an immediate act, of vision.
The poem’s flaw lies in the weakness of the personal crystallization
upon which the vision rests, as the Bridge is spanned upon its piers.
This flaw gets into the idiom and texture. Sometimes the image blurs,
the sequence breaks, the plethora of words is blinding. There is even,
in the development of certain figures, a tendency toward inflation which
one is tempted to connect with the febrile, false ebullience of the
American epoch (1924–1929) in which the poem was written. Yet the
concept is sound; the poet’s genius has on the whole equaled his
ambition. Even the failings in execution help to express the epoch, for
it is in the understanding and creating of _persons_ that our rapidly
collectivizing age is weakest.
Crane’s myth must, of course, not be confused with the myth as we find
it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen. The Bridge is not a
particularized being to be popularly sung; it is a conceptual symbol to
be _used_. And the fact that this symbol begins as a man-constructed
thing is of the essence of its truth for our instrumental age. From a
machine-made entity, the poem makes the Bridge into a machine. But it
has beauty. This means that through the men who builded it, the life of
America has flowed into it—the life of our past _and our future_. A
cosmic content has given beauty to the Bridge, and must give it a poetic
function. From being a machine of matter, it becomes an instrument of
spirit. _The Bridge is matter made into human action._
We may confidently say that this message of “The Bridge” will be more
comprehensible in the future (not in the immediate future), when the
functionally limited materialism of our collectivist era has, through
success, grown inadequate to the deepened needs of a mankind released
from economic insecurity and prepared, by leisure, for regeneration. For
even as necessity, today and tomorrow, drives most men to think
collectively in order that they may survive; necessity, day after
tomorrow, will drive men to think personally (poetically, cosmically) in
order that their survival may have meaning. When the collectivist era
has done its work—the abolition of economic classes and of animal
want—men will turn, as only the privileged of the past could ever turn,
toward the discovery of Man. But when that time comes, the message of
“The Bridge” will be taken for granted; it will be too obvious, even as
today it is too obscure, for general interest. The revelation, in
Crane’s poems, however, of a man who through the immediate conduit of
his senses realized the organic unity between his self, the objective
world and the cosmos, will be accepted as a great human value. And the
poems whose very texture reveals and sings this man will be
remembered.[4]
_1933_
_II. AMERICAN TRAITS_
1. IN DEFENSE OF OUR VULGARITY