First, let me say a big thank you to my contributor! As you say, in your comment on my posting on Crane, this blog probably does not receive much attention. I’m just pleased to just have the three readers I currently have- and I’m including you in this number. (I hope that you are reading this posting at least to see if I reply to your comment.)
First, let me say that your response was hardly rude at all, except for its general tone of impatience. I do resent the implication that I am some fresh-faced sophomore; in fact, I am old as the hills – or at least I feel that way sometimes. The truth of the matter is that I took a long break from reading poetry, or anything at all for that matter, and am in the process of re-entering the literary world and so appreciate anything I can get in terms of reading tips or alternative ways of viewing the issues that interest me. I will be sure to glance through Louis MacNiece and Roethke, who I have so far overlooked.
About Crane himself – our dispute about his ‘value’ could only be settled by an external arbiter who would assess our respective arguments and choose the most rhetorically persuasive. I agree that there is no such thing as an objective science of aesthetics; my use of the term ‘science’ in my posting on Crane was perhaps ill-advised. What I am trying to do is more a study of the psychology of aesthetic appreciation. My posting “On Epistemic Hunger” comes closest, at the moment, to articulating what I want to say.
Having conceded that there is no objective way to determine how good Crane is, I cannot resist the lure of rhetoric. The most persuasive form of literary criticism, when it comes to poetry, is the close reading. Consider the poem “At Melville’s Tomb”:
Often beneath the wave, wide from the ledge
The dice of dead men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in the corridors of shell.
Then in the circuit of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides… High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
When I first read this poem I interpreted the figure “dice of dead men’s bones” in almost a literal fashion, that is, I imagined bones broken into fragments as small as dice. Since then, I have re-evaluated my understanding of the poem. It is indeed mystical, as you rightly pointed out. The first half of the poem describes a world that is pre-Melville, pre-religious, ruled by chance and dominated by death. However the second half of the poem presents a world that has discovered religion. It is perhaps Moby Dick that is “the circuit of one vast coil”. Melville, in his work, provides a kind of spiritual answer to death– though not one that is soothing and anodyne (the eyes are “frosted” and the answers “silent”). It is a kind of answer nevertheless. Mere map-making, Crane suggests, can go no farther in explaining the world than Melville’s work.
I admit that this interpretation came to me just now, while I sit tapping away in the middle of the night. It is a strange interpretation but it makes sense to me. Perhaps Crane is not wholly incoherent – I still believe he is flawed though: the word “dice” occurs, not as part of an image or image-complex, but because it connotes chance; the word “calyx” occurs (I think) because it suggests cornucopia; and “livid” occurs because it is near homonym of “lived”. Crane’s approach to language imparts a kind of opacity to his verse; it gives one the feeling that there is a kind of confusion at the level of sentence construction, simple grammar. Dylan Thomas has in fact been criticised for similar reasons.
However I admit that I like Crane more now than I did. As Blake says, “The man of fixed opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind”.
Amigo, I appreciate your kind response, but, as I’ve been allowed the computer again, I’d like to do a better job for Crane than I did the first time. I hope this won’t seem like overkill, but will just be a slightly more articulate (if I can be such) version of the first. I appreciate your interest in psychology, but (skipping to another statement) don’t really believe that anyone outside the argument is often in a better position to judge an argument than the arguers themselves. I say this in response to your enthusiasm for rhetoric – especially since some poets are not very good in prose or speech – Edwin Arlington Robinson famously inarticulate.
I’m glad you’re enjoying Crane more, and believe that his poetry, like the poetry of Geoffrey Hill’s and others, is dense not from an attempt to be obfuscatory, but because of the complexity of the things he’s reaching for, and the means he needs to hold it with. I know you mention not finding difficulty a draw back in poetry, but am not sure you quite get its prevalence or its source. There are great “difficulties” in most good poets, even those most generally associated with “clarity”, like Frost, Wordworth, Clare, Keats, and the Robert Browning of the great “The Ring and the Book”. As Hill says good poetry is necessarily “eccentric”, because we are eccentric. So an embodiment of consciousness is, like the poetry of Berryman and Roethke, Wordsworth and Browning, eccentric.
Though I think you’re right about Crane’s desire to withhold something (and who doesn’t want to withhold?) contributing to his density, and believe you’re right to say that his withheld homosexuality is part of this, I think the main reason that he’s dense is that his world is turbulent and complex, and his only way of holding it is in a thick clump of twisting snakes and sunlight. A Ted Hughes statement is relevant here, something like poetry being the repetition again and again of something that can’t really be said, and which the poet may not even quite want to say (Roethke rightly says points out the innate necessity of some sort of repetition in some poetry, though it is repetition with increasing emphasis, repetition that further explains). Eliot is a great example of this, though the most obsessive poet I know might be the great Thomas Traherne. Heidigger is right when he says that all great poets only have one idea, though idea isn’t quite the right word.
What I should have said in my first response is that, whether intentionally or not, you did quote a rather poor clump of Crane’s poetry to represent him. From the same poem you might have quoted the great line about love being a “burnt match skaing in a urinal”, or the lines about the phonograph that James Wright so rightly loves. Maybe these are in “Quaker Hill” or somewhere else in “The Bridge” (I don’t have my Crane with me, and I hate checking things on the internet), but whether or nay such lines are in “Tunnel”, they were still close enough to you that you might have chosen better ones – as you did later by quoting Crane’s Melville poem.
Your major quibble with the lines you quoted from Crane’s “The Tunnel” were with an adjective. In his line on love the adjective “burnt” could not have been used more purposefully or effectively. The image of the burnt match skaing in a urinal has an effectiveness and intensity around the quallity of the first two lines of Eliot’s “Prufrock” (which Allen Tate called something like the first shotgun shot of modern poetry); and such lines and images aren’t rare in Crane’s poetry. You can find them in his brilliant “O Carib Isle!” (even right at the beginning with the tarantula) and in his very great “The Dance” (including bits like the narrator screaming from the arrow-shot stake).
I’m sure you’re right that you state your methodolgy clearer elsewhere, but I think you neglect the sacred importance of taste in your first Crane statement. In the great Poe’s essay on the greater Tennyson he says that if you don’t like certain lines of Tennyson then you’re not much of a reader of poetry. I’ve been told that Eliot says much the same thing about Dryden’s poetry (and, of course, Dryden says, somewhat rightly, that only poets should be allowed to criticize poetry). The poets I like tend to trust taste (an affinity with the dead, and sometimes with the living) rather than theories. Housman demonstrates this when he says that he knows true poetry when his beard bristles (a valuable statement despite being ridiculous and unreliable), and Emily Dickinson says she knows that she’s reading true poetry when reading makes her feel deathly cold. These type of responses seem to privilege something very private, but in part they’re right to. I think Longinus partly gets at the heart of responses and judgement when he says that the ability to judge literature comes with old age. He might also agree that it comes with experience, and would probably also agree that neither age nor experience can guarantee it (as you can see by old timers who swear by Allen Ginsberg, or Frank O’Hara, or even Scott Kendrick – or in the general lack of wisdom of King Lear).
And just one last, possibly unnecessary, thing about your desire to in some way unify the judgements of people (I’ll keep this statement vague even though it may represent you slightly). In his great essay on Blake (which some people have called the greatest manifesto of aestheticism in English – and I find your use of the word a little strange) Swinburne states clearly that there are two sides that can never be brought together. Those who love poetry will love it, and those who don’t believe in it will continue to not believe in it (Theophile Gautier’s preface to his “Mademoiselle de Maupin” is a wonderfully savage serious joke about this). Swinburne repeats that no truce (or assimilation) should be conisdered in the war.