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Aliki Barnstone
Crossing Hart Crane's Broken Bridge from the Nineteenth
to the Twentieth Century or What Writers Can Learn from Hart Crane
"Great works of art have no more affecting lesson than this.
They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored
inflexibility." —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Long ago, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley and taking a course
in Modern Poetry, I proved myself very unhip by launching into a defense
of Hart Crane’s work. My classmates and professor had made themselves
giddy with their escalating rhetoric deriding “The Bridge,”
and I was the killjoy who talked about the beauty of the language. Recently,
when I mentioned to a poet-friend that I was writing about what writers
can learn from Hart Crane, he responded, “How about what not to
do?” I recounted a story: when Crane stayed with Alan Tate and
Carolyn Gordon, and Gordon confronted him for not helping around the
house, he responded, “I’m too sensitive and nervous to do
housework.” My friend said, “That says it all, doesn’t
it? He writes the poems, but he’s too sensitive and nervous to
clean them up.” Now I’m afraid I’m going to make myself
very unhip again. My intent when I began this piece was to defend Crane,
but as I reread, I found myself recoiling. I’d never written about
a writer I wasn’t in love with, and now I’d fallen out of
love with Hart, viscerally. You’ve been there, too, haven’t
you? You’re lying awake in bed, thinking you hate the way your
lover smells and hate the way your lover breathes. Hart and I were in
a bad way. Before I would have gladly become a boy for him, now I didn’t
want to pledge, “never to let go,” didn’t even want to
cock my hip, play Walt Whitman, and put my hand in his, “so—”
I searched inside as we do when love drops us into the abyss and “elevators
drop us from our day.” I asked, “Why this revulsion?”
What was it that I loved before? Why did I forgive his flaws? The problem
for me now lies in the abhorrence I feel for the body of work, the same
body that before was an ecstasy to read, when “cool arms murmurously
about me lay.” Then I swooned for Hart—who wouldn’t?—when
he writes in “The Harbor Dawn”:
And you beside me blessèd now while
sirens
Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day—
Serenely now, before day claims our eyes
Your cool arms murmurously about me lay.
While myriad snowy hands are clustering
at the panes—
Your hands within in my hands are deeds;
My tongue upon your throat—singing
arms close…
How do writers learn from each other? By reading creatively, by knowing
the work practically carnally, knowing it from head to foot, until with
the “tongue upon your throat—singing / arms close,” the
dead text comes alive, until “your hands within my hands are deeds,”
are words on the page. Here in what Barton St. Armand calls the “ghostly
intimacy” of influence, the arms and throat and hands of Crane’s
body of work sing with Whitman, whose hand Hart holds throughout “The
Bridge,” in an ecstatic reading. We hear between the pulses of
Crane’s “bare-stript heart” this passage from “Song
of Myself”:
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the
stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want,
not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your
valvèd voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent
summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips
and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone,
and plunged your tongue to my
bare-stript
heart,
And reach’d til you felt my beard,
and reach’d till you held my feet.
In both Crane and Whitman the reader is the lover. Both passages come
into language from making love, from sensations of fog or grass, of
waking from dream to dawn, from flesh to words. Whitman has revised
the passages from the New Testament in which Mary washes Jesus’s
feet with her tears and anoints his head with precious oil. Crane in
“The Harbor Dawn” sings a musical bridge across the century,
echoing Whitman’s imperative to “loose the stop from your
throat” with "my tongue upon your throat.” He hears the
biblical in Walt and he consecrates it: “And you beside me blessèd
now while sirens / Sing to us.” “The Harbor Dawn” might
be Crane’s Ars Poetica of influence. The poem begins:
Insistently through sleep—a tide
of voices—
They meet you listening midway in your
dream,
The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated
noises:
Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog horns. . . signals dispersed
in veils.
While Whitman listens attentively to “the lull I like, the hum
of your valvèd voice,” Crane meets the voices “midway
in dream,” translates the “Far strum of fog horns. . . signals
dispersed in veils.” Crane makes a symphony from the lulls and
hums and strums of the now and the texts of the past. Listen—you
can hear Eliot’s voice coming through the fog, and Dickinson’s
voice in white surplices. In “The Harbor Dawn” I mind how
Hart has lain and loafed with each loved poet into “a transparent
morning” and come into his own vision and music, as when he writes
the rigorously modern line: “The window goes blond slowly. Frostily
clears.”
So, after all this beauty and transport, you may ask, why the post-coital
depression? Because Crane fails so often to make “Your hands within
in my hands” into “deeds,” and to fulfill his promise.
To go back to my classmates at Berkeley, for a moment, I believe that
one reason they found it so easy to scorn Crane is because his work
thwarts the expectations of high modernism when in The Bridge
he returns to Whitman’s romanticism. Though Eliot’s influence
is everywhere in Crane, it is not the moderns but the nineteenth century
Americans that make him wild with it. I’m the same way myself and
perhaps that’s why before I stood by my man. Before I felt that
those who failed to love Crane had failed to read creatively; now I
see that I retreat when Crane fails to be
animating reader, and so fails at his own Emersonian poetics.
Crane writes in “General Aims and Theories” that he puts “no
particular value on the simple objectives of ‘modernity,’”
nor on the “deliberate program . . . of a ‘break’ with
the past or tradition . . . . [The poet] must tax his sensibility and
his touchstone of experience for the proper selection of these themes
. . . and that is where he either stands, or falls into useless archeology.”
(Weber 218). The ideal poem for Crane evokes a Blakean “’innocence’
or absolute beauty,” a consciousness which discovers “under
new forms certain spiritual illuminations,” which shine “from
experience directly, and not from previous precepts or preconceptions.
It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word,
never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident
as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward”
(Weber 221). Crane here recasts Emersonian self-reliance in which one
must free oneself from received ideas. Emerson eschews “influence”
in principle when he calls for a poet who will make “America a
poem in our eyes.”
He redefines influence as an ecstatic instant in which the poet ascends
to an “absolute” —“For all poetry was all written
before time was” (185). Emerson proclaimed the poets “liberating
gods” who “unlock our chains and admit us to a new scene”
(194). The operative phrase here is new scene. The poet delivers us
to the new scene of our own creativity, and, as Crane so beautifully
puts it, the “new word” becomes “an active principle”
in the reader’s consciousness. In his “The Harbor Dawn,”
in “The River,” and in other moments of startling imagination
and music, Crane builds a Brooklyn Bridge from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century, from the 1930s to the now, as we can see in these
lines from the Proem:
Again the traffic lights that skim thy
swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of
stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity.
Sadly, as though he predicted his own fatal weakness and his own inability
to embrace the ghostly intimacies of the past and urge forward into
his own “new word,” Crane’s work often falls, he puts
it, “into useless archeology.” Too often Crane swings to the
other pole of Emerson’s notion of influence, as when Emerson admonishes,
“Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic” (127) and presciently
for Crane, “Imitation is suicide” (121). It is painful and
annoying to linger too long on Crane’s infelicities (which are
also infidelities to his predecessors), but bear with me little longer
while I complain. Here is an
example of Crane’s failure to dwell in the possibilities of past
texts, and so we see him kill himself by imitating an imitation of poetry,
which makes for an ersatz Hart Crane, as appealing as imitation margarine:
Behold the dragon’s covey—amphibian,
ubiquitous
To hedge the sea, wrap the headland, ride
The Blue’s cloud-templed districts
unto ether…
While Iliads glimmer through eyes raised
in pride
Hell’s belt springs wider into heaven’s
plumed side.
O bright circumferences, heights employed
to fly
War’s fiery kennel masked in downy
offings,—
What a turn off. If there are some good turns of phrase here, I am so
revolted by the words surrounding them that I can’t hear them.
And ain’t I righteous when I yell, “That’s a load of
crap!”—and slam out the door. Imagine your despair if one
of your students turned in work like this. It would be a smart, misguided
student who had played too many games of Dungeons and Dragons, who had
read too many adventure, war stories and fantasies, and needed to forget
about King Arthur. You would be gentle and tell the student that there
was some lovely music here, some fine imagination, but he might try
to let his own voice speak, instead of some idea of poesy. But wait!
This isn’t the work a nineteen-year-old boy majoring in engineering,
these are the lines of the canonized poet Hart Crane, overwritten, bombastic,
over-mannered, and hackneyed. “While Iliads
glimmer though eyes raised in pride” sounds the patriotic mumbo-jumbo
of the worst presidential speeches. I hear Crane trying to echo Milton’s
rhetoric and Dickinson’s circumference, yet these lines are not
even archaic, they are anachronistic, meaning they are outside of time—if
only they weren’t preserved with ink, and outside of time in that
other way. Neither Dickinson nor Milton would sound like this because
they wrote in their own present time and brilliantly into ours. When
Crane writes this badly—and I’ve found so many awful passages—he
betrays us all, and not with a kiss; he turns his face away, won’t
come close as a reader or to his reader.
Now I feel sick as Blake’s rose. I want to cross over to Hart and
I want you, my readers, to cross, too. How can we cross this bridge
now that I’ve attenuated the girders and torn up the pavement?
Poor broken Hart, Pretty Boy. Drunken Crane. Hart stopped too young.
Poor Crane lifting the up the pieces of his broken Bridge. Ah, and that’s
what I love about him, the Hart of romance and formal prosody coupled
with the Crane of technology and modernity. Now let’s cruise down
“The River.” He writes:
—can you
imagine—while an EXPRESS makes time
like
SCIENCE—COMMERCE and the HOLY GHOST
RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE
NORTHPOLE
WALLSTREET AND VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES
OR
WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting
ears
and no more sermons window flashing roar
breathtaking—as you like it . . .
eh?
So the 20th Century—so
whizzed the Limited—roared by and
left
three men, still hungry on the tracks,
ploddingly
watching the tail lights wizen and converge,
slip-
ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.
All right. No more transparent mornings and afternoons loafing and exploring
Crane’s whole body, slowly, intimately. “So the 20th Century—so
whizzed the Limited—roared by and left” us kinky and transgressive.
When Hart grins at me and says, “breathtaking—as you like
it . . . eh?” I say, “Yes!” I’m a boy for him again.
I mark his hot spots and bend him open for a half-clothed, zipless quickie
in some bathroom stall on an as-yet unbuilt bullet train criss-crossing
America. In my fantasy, Hart Crane and I are
Watching the tail lights wizen and converge,
slip-
ping gimleted and neatly out of sight
—and into the twenty-first century imagination.
Works Cited
Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, The Centennial Edition.
Introduction by Harold Bloom. Edited by Marc Simon. New York: Liveright,
2001
Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems and Selected Prose of Hart Crane.
Edited and
Introduced by Brom Weber. Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1966.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson's Prose and Poetry. Edited by Saudra
Morris and
Joel Porte. New York: Norton, 2001.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Edited by Sculley Bradley and
Harold W. Blodgett.
New York: Norton, 1973.
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