Before I start talking about Hart Crane, I need to clear something up. What is the desideratum of this rambling, inconsistent and potentially endless treatise? There are two ways of writing about art and literature, a subjective approach or an objective approach. One writes a subjective aesthetic theory when one describes the art that one likes or dislikes and then formalizes one’s judgements into an organised system (or, alternative, seeks to justify one’s own artistic output). I am aiming at something else. I want to write an objective science of aesthetics. True, artistic appreciation is necessarily subjective, varying from person to person, but the cognitive processes that underlie artistic appreciation are, I believe, universal and susceptible to analysis. I could waste my time arguing that “Home and Away” is banal or that “American Idol” is stupid but this would ignore the fact that millions love these programs. A scientific theory of aesthetics should simultaneously explain why some people love Thomas Pynchon and others love Star Wars. Perhaps a better term than “objective” would be “inter-subjective”. On the one hand, the theory requires that one understand and analyse one’s own response to cultural texts; on the other it requires that one project oneself into the minds of others to determine their reasons for liking some particular cultural text.
The reason why I have taken some pains to set out my methodology is that I am about to break my own rules. Hart Crane has been a major influence on many twentieth century poets and this suggests perhaps that he has some ‘objective’ value. But I must admit that I don’t like him very much. The following, then, is an entirely subjective appraisal, although in the fashion of all belles-lettres I shall try to defend my stance.
Hart Crane was born in 1899 and died at the age of 32 by committing suicide (as so many great writers have). During his lifetime, living mostly in New York, he published two volumes of poetry “White Towers” and “The Bridge”. Like John Ashbery, Crane was gay, and (also like Ashbery) Crane wrote highly difficult poetry. There is a connection here. Neither poet was a public homosexual, and it may be that alienation and habits of self-concealment informed their poetry and even their decisions to write verse in the first place.
Although Crane is difficult, this is not the reason why I have a problem with his poetry. Difficulty alone is not a fault. “The Waste Land” is (apparently) a difficult poem but this does not stop critics from hailing it at as the greatest of the twentieth century. In Crane’s case, though, what seems like difficulty may simply be sloppiness. Consider the following passage from “The Tunnel”.
And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns–on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
–And did their riding eyes right through your side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft, –gigantically down
Probing through you– toward me, O evermore!
And when they dragged your retching flesh,
Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore–
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?
In this extract, Crane imagines encountering Edgar Allan Poe on the subway and alludes to the circumstances of Poe’s death, the morning after he was found wandering Baltimore in a delirious state. The figure to which I would particularly like to draw your attention is “their eyes like unwashed platters”. Presumably the “they” referred to are the witnesses to Poe’s last day; by comparing their eyes to platters Crane evokes the anxiety of being an object of others unsympathetic attention (of being a cynosure, perhaps?) But why does he use the adjective “unwashed”? It adds nothing to the image. It is as if Crane needed a trochee to complete the line and simply plucked one out of the air.
It occurs to me as I write this that perhaps “their eyes” are unwashed because they are not crying, although they should be. This does not undermine the point that I am making however. The simile is incoherent. “And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride” seems to imply that unwashed platters often ride. “The Waste Land’ may be difficult but the images it contains are always crisp and definite. This image is not.
In case it is suspected that I am simply choosing a weak line, let me say that fuzziness pervades much of Crane’s writing. He seems to choose words more for their sound than for their sense. Perhaps this musicality is the reason why he is considered a ‘poet’s poet’ (he was highly admired by figures as diverse as Robert Lowell, John Berryman and James K. Baxter): perhaps other poets learned from Crane the all-important skill of how to put a line together. In other words, perhaps they admired his craft rather than his poetry. I don’t know.
If someone who likes Crane wants to put me in my place, they can post a cogent defence of him as a comment on this blog.
No one else seems to have bothered to write a response, since I guess plenty of blogs get about as much attention as a cigarette butt on the pavement, so, hombre, here’s a small one. Your idea of science producing an objective aesthetic theory is rather hackneyed and blue-eyed. Pound’s ideal of the literary critic was the scientist (see ABC of Reading etc), but he doesn’t think this can ever lead to any objective statements about literature. He says that all statements on literature should be prefaced by “I think”.
Also, maybe you don’t quite understand what it means for a poet to choose “sound” over “sense”. Even a poet as responsible and faithful to his subject matter as Louis MacNeice says that he will choose a word slightly more for its sound than its meaning. There is no privileging of fuzziness in this choice, but an awareness of the power of aural meaning, something Eliot is highly atuned to. Crane, better than almost anyone, understands what Eliot means by poetry being able to be understood before it is understood; or what Stevens (whom he loved) later refers to as poetry’s ability to resist the intelligence almost perfectly. Crane’s a poet whose meaning lies quite strongly in his images, and his images are not fuzzy, but incredibly well chosen. He made a good defence of his symbolic language to Harriet Monroe in a letter that isn’t that hard to find, but just reading carefully a poem like “Lacrimae Christi” should explain it itself. When the nights open by chanting “pyramids” Crane is being very symbolically clear about what he means. He means that some more ancient, more substantial thing is being accessed at that moment. This is the theme of much of his poetry, and something no more obscure than the ideas of Shelley, Blake, and Keats, and Baudelaire as well (seeing the absolute in the transient plastic thing). He is a Romantic in their tradition, but as modern as Eliot. It is that combination of knowledge of almost religious things along with a deep understanding of the modern world, and his incredible use of imagery and poetic sound that really helped to create the sort of poetry that affected so deeply Berryman etc and provided one example of the sort of poetic position they wanted to write from.
The idea that the multitude of Crane’s images comes from confusion, laziness, incompetence, or lack of genuine art (which I think is implicit in calling his images fuzzy) is a criticism that was fired at people like Dylan Thomas as well. Thomas answered brilliantly that his poetry was not the kind that could be contained in one overriding image, but that the images needed to conflict with each other and pull in different directions etc. This logic (not taken from Thomas, but arrived at independently) is something that is also part of Crane’s poetics, and a part of poets whose image-dense language may be compared with his, like Theodore Roethke and W.S. Graham – they use even larger clusters of images than Crane does.
I’m being hurried along to return this computer now, so will end in a second. I don’t mean to be too rude but I think that an “aesthetic theory” (and like James Merrill etc I deeply distrust ideas about poetry) if at all possible/desirable should come from many more years of intense and openhearted reading than you seem to have undertaken before “criticising” Crane. If you come up with a theory that prefers Kate Camp to Hart Crane then your theory isn’t of much use, and you’d be much better reading Dylan Thomas who only ever read for “pleasure” not for the forming of ideas.