The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious. It is the only poetry I am
acquainted with which is at once contemporary and in the grand manner.
It is an American poetry. Crane’s themes are abstractly, metaphysically
conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the
American scene. In such poems as The Wine Menagerie, For the Marriage of
Faustus and Helen, Recitative, he is the poet of the complex urban
civilization of his age: precision, abstraction, power. There is no
_pastiche_; when he employs symbols from traditional literature, the
intention is personally symbolic; it is never falsely pretentious with
the common baggage of poetical speech, the properties coveted by the
vulgar as inherently poetic.
Hart Crane’s first experiments in verse are not, of course, collected in
this volume, which contains with one or two exceptions only those poems
exhibiting the qualities likely to be permanent in his work. Of these
exceptions there is the perfectly written piece of Imagism, Garden
Abstract. This poem evinces several properties of the “new poetry” of a
decade ago, the merits and the limitations of the Imagists. To the
Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry. He learned their
structural economy; he followed their rejection of the worn-out poetic
phrase; he must have studied the experiments in rhythm of Pound,
Aldington, Fletcher. From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of
what it is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary.
But Crane suddenly and profoundly broke with the methods of Imagism,
with its decorative and fragmentary world. To the conceptual mind a
world set up not by inclusive assertion but by exclusive attention to
the objects of sense lacks imaginative coördination; a method which
refuses to exceed the dry presentation of _petites sensations_ confines
the creative vision to suggestions, to implicit indications, but it
cannot arrive at the direct affirmation, of a complete world. A series
of Imagistic poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane 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.
The poet who tries to release the imagination as an integer of
perception attempts the solution of the leading contemporary problem of
his art. It would be impertinent to enumerate here the underlying causes
of the dissociation of the modern consciousness: the poet no longer
apprehends his world as a Whole. The dissociation appears decisively for
the first time in Baudelaire. It is the separation of vision and
subject; since Baudelaire’s time poets have in some sense been deficient
in the one or the other. For the revolt of Rimbaud, in this distinction,
was a repudiation of the commonly available themes of poetry, followed
by a steady attenuation of vision in the absence of thematic control.
Exactly to the extent to which the ready-pmade theme controls the
vision, the vision is restricted by tradition and may, to that extent,
be defined by tradition. In The Waste Land, which revives the essence of
the problem, Mr. Eliot displays vision and subject once more in
traditional schemes; the vision for some reason is dissipated, and the
subject dead. For while Mr. Eliot might have written a more ambitiously
unified poem, the unity would have been false; tradition as unity is not
contemporary. The important contemporary poet has the rapidly
diminishing privilege of reorganizing the subjects of the past. He must
construct and assimilate his own subjects. Dante had only to assimilate
his.
If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained maximum,
it is because he has not found a suitable theme. To realize even
partially, at the present time, the maximum of poetic energy
demonstrates an important intention. Crane’s poems are a fresh vision of
the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that
only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take
it in. Until vision and subject completely fuse, the poems will be
difficult. The comprehensiveness and lucidity of any poetry, the
capacity for poetry being assumed as proved, are in direct proportion to
the availability of a comprehensive and perfectly articulated given
theme.
Crane wields a sonorous rhetoric that takes the reader to Marlowe and
the Elizabethans. His blank verse, the most sustained medium he
controls, is pre-Websterian; it is measured, richly textured,
rhetorical. But his spiritual allegiances are outside the English
tradition. Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea
poems, Voyages, in Emblems of Conduct, in allusions to the sea
throughout his work, there is something of Melville’s intense,
transcendental brooding on the mystery of the “high interiors of the
sea.” I do not know whether he has mastered Poe’s criticism, yet some of
his conviction that the poet should be intensely local must stem from
Poe. Most of it, however, he undoubtedly gets from Whitman. Whitman’s
range was possible in an America of prophecy; Crane’s America is
materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a
realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience,
gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the
myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane’s poetry is a concentration of
certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth.
The great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader is the style.
It is possible that his style may check the immediate currency of the
most distinguished American poetry of the age, for there has been very
little preparation in America for a difficult poetry; the Imagistic
impressionism of the last ten years has not supplied it. Although Crane
is probably not a critical and systematic reader of foreign literatures,
his French is better than Whitman’s; he may have learned something from
Laforgue and, particularly, Rimbaud; or something of these poets from
Miss Sitwell, Mr. Wallace Stevens, or Mr. T. S. Eliot.
He shares with Rimbaud the device of oblique presentation of theme. The
theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a
series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into
an equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar
_milieu_ of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not
immediately grasped. The _logical_ meaning can never be derived (see
Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the _poetical_ meaning is a direct
intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter
of the poem. The poem does not _convey_; it _presents_; it is not
topical, but expressive.
There is the opinion abroad that Crane’s poetry is, in some indefinite
sense, “new.” It is likely to be appropriated by one of the several
esoteric cults of the American soul. It tends toward the formation of a
state of mind, the critical equivalent of which would be in effect an
exposure of the confusion and irrelevance of the current journalism of
poetry, and of how far behind the creative impulse the critical
intelligence, at the moment, lags. It is to be hoped, therefore, that
this state of mind, where it may be registered at all, will not at its
outset be shunted into a false context of obscure religious values, that
a barrier will not be erected between it and the rational order of
criticism. For, unless the present critic is deceived as to the
structure of his tradition, the well-meaning criticism since Poe has
supported a vicious confusion: it has transferred the states of mind of
poetry from their proper contexts to the alien contexts of moral and
social aspiration. The moral emphasis is valid; but its focus on the
consequences of the state of mind, instead of on its properties as art,
has throttled a tradition in poetry. The moral values of literature
should derive from literature, not from the personal values of the
critic; their public circulation in criticism, if they are not
ultimately to be rendered inimical to literature, should be controlled
by the literary intention. There have been poetries of “genius” in
America, but each of these as poetry has been scattered, and converted
into an _impasse_ to further extensions of the same order of
imagination.
A living art is new; it is old. The formula which I have contrived in
elucidation of Crane’s difficulty for the reader (a thankless task,
since the difficulty inheres equally in him) is a formula for most
romantic poetry. Shelley could not have been influenced by Rimbaud, but
he wrote this “difficult” verse:
_Pinnacled dim in the intense inane._
The present faults of Crane’s poetry (it has its faults: it is not the
purpose of this Foreword to disguise them) cannot be isolated in a
line-by-line recognition of his difficulty. If the poems are sometimes
obscure, the obscurity is structural and deeper. His faults, as I have
indicated, lie in the occasional failure of meeting between vision and
subject. The vision often strains and overreaches the theme. This fault,
common among ambitious poets since Baudelaire, is not unique with them.
It appears whenever the existing poetic order no longer supports the
imagination. It appeared in the eighteenth century with the poetry of
William Blake.