 As
Reviewed By: |
CPR Classic Readings: "At Melville's Tomb" |
As
Reviewed By: |
CPR Classic Readings: "At Melville's Tomb" |
There
is an anecdote, too good not
to be true, recounted by William Jay Smith, about a soused Hart Crane
sidling up to the poet Witter Bynner in Mexico City and hissing, “Witter
Bynner, you’re going to have a bitter winter.” Crane’s poem
“Passage” refers to a “too well known biography,” and anyone
familiar with his poems knows his star-crossed life as well. Both make
clear that Crane had bitter seasons of his own. One
particularly disappointing autumn came in 1925. When the few meager leads
he had on advertising jobs fell through (he was perennially hard-up for
cash), Crane decided to sell to magazines some of the poems he had written
that summer. Malcolm Cowley describes the composition of the poem
“Passage” during a drunken Fourth of July party at which Crane, in
full face-paint, mugged his way through a “cannibal dance.” His
“face still daubed with house paint, red and brown,” Cowley writes,
“he sat by the lilacs in the dooryard, meditatively pouring a box of
salt on the phonograph,” and with a glance up toward the branches
intoned, “Where the cedar leaf divides the sky . . . where the cedar
leaf divides the sky . . . I was promised an improved infancy”—the
vatic opening of “Passages.” When
Crane sent the finished poem to Marianne Moore, who was then editor of The
Dial, she rejected it, saying
“its multiform content accounts, I suppose, for what seems to us
a lack of simplicity and cumulative force.” T. S. Eliot likewise
rejected “Passage” for The
Criterion. When Moore did take a poem, “The Wine Menagerie,” she
completely and shamelessly rewrote it under a new title, calling it
“Again.” Crane became upset the more he thought about this, at one
point even crying himself to sleep on a friend’s bed. Moore, he wrote,
insisted “on changing it around and cutting it up until you would not
even recognize it. . . . What it all means now I can’t make out, and I
never would have consented to such an outrageous joke if I had not so
desperately needed the twenty dollars.” When the poem appeared, Kenneth
Burke at The Dial
remarked that Miss Moore had taken all of the Wine out of the Menagerie. To
add to Crane’s unlucky streak, a Philadelphia magazine, The
Guardian, folded
before it could publish Crane’s extraordinary sequence “Voyages”
with an accompanying article on the poem by Allen Tate. The magazine did,
however, print the decidedly unfortunate forthcoming announcement
“‘Voyages, four remarkable poems by Allen Tate’ [!] will appear in
the next issue!” Meanwhile, Crane had sent the manuscript of his first
collection, White Buildings, to
his friend Harrison Smith at Harcourt, Brace, who turned it down. “I
feel certain,” Smith wrote, “you are a genuine poet—and there are
not many genuine poets lying around these days. . . . It really is the
most perplexing kind of poetry. One reads it with a growing irritation,
not at you but at himself, for the denseness of one’s own intellect.”
(Smith, who had put Crane up in New York and at his house in Long Island,
may have experienced a “growing irritation” with Crane himself, as
Crane tended to wear out his friends with his extreme behavior.) From
the vantage point of some eighty years later, it is not hard to fathom how
these editors could have misjudged or misunderstood Crane’s poems in
this way, and their occasional puzzlement underscores just how astonishing
his method must have seemed at the time, and how astonishing it remains
today. Mind you, these were not unschooled tyros who easily lost their way
in modern poetry, but eminent editors and poets—and not just eminent
editors and poets, but eminent modernists,
perfectly capable of resolving questions of difficulty and innovation.
What was it about Crane’s work that puzzled them? This, in a sense, is the central question concerning Crane’s work, and
the hardest one to answer. A partial answer, I think, lies in the type and
degree of opacity that Crane employs from poem to poem—some forms of
obscurity work while others do not. This is a lesson that Crane learned
the hard way, I suspect, on his journey from White
Buildings to The Bridge. And
it is a lesson that continues to bear on much of the poetry that gets
written today. In
October of 1925, Crane began work on his one of his finest lyrics, “At
Melville’s Tomb.” Editors rejected it; he revised it and sent it out
again. When he sent it to The Dial, Moore agreed to
publish it with the provision that the last stanza be omitted. Crane
withdrew the poem. When he later sent the poem to Harriett Monroe at Poetry,
she replied with a long list of queries. Crane wrote back: “You ask me
how compass, quadrant and sextant
‘contrive’ tides. I ask how Eliot can possibly believe that
‘Every street lamp that I pass
beats like a fatalistic drum,’”
lines from Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” As Crane writes
elsewhere in that letter, he is “more interested in the so-called
illogical impingements of words on the consciousness,” seeking “fresh
concepts, more inclusive evaluation” than can be arrived at through
reason. As Crane wrote, “the rationale of metaphor belongs to another order of experience than
science.” Some
of Crane’s explications in the letter are as mysterious as the passages
he is unpacking. Of the line “The calyx of death’s bounty giving
back,” Crane writes, “This calyx refers in a double ironic sense both
to a cornucopia and the vortex made by a sinking vessel.” Double ironic?
Crane’s cryptic elucidation of his own poem from a rational, denotative
standpoint convinced Monroe to publish the poem (alongside her letter and
his reply), but as a definitive reading of the poem it was doomed to fail.
Crane must have known it would. His very purpose in writing the poem was
to arrive at non-rational, connotative connections that could not be fully
elucidated in logical terms. In
a sense, what disturbed Crane’s editors most about his poetry was its
resistance to paraphrase, or as Harrison Smith said, an irritation
with “the denseness of one’s own intellect.” What else but the
perceived lack of paraphrasable content could Edmund Wilson have been
objecting to when he wrote, “Mr. Crane has a most remarkable style, a
style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style,
if there could be such a thing as a great style which was, not merely not
applied to a great subject, but not, so far as one can see, applied to any
subject at all.” Crane’s metaphors are wilder, more violently
inventive than Eliot’s relatively polite simile of streetlamps beating
like fatalistic drums: In “At Melville’s Tomb,” fragments of bone
bring news of dead sailors, the sea both sucks in and gives forth
portents. As Robert Pinsky wrote recently, “The lifted eyes of religion,
the sextant of navigation, Melville's genius: All are ways toward
knowledge that contrive or discover meanings, despite their mortal
limitations. In a word, they are tragic.” This is the promising
beginnings of a paraphrase, in the sense that Yvor Winters understood the
term. A number of Crane’s poems, of course, are paraphrasable, such as “Repose of Rivers,” which Yvor Winters (rightly, I think) understood as a lyric poem spoken by a river, probably a tributary to the Mississippi. And then there are Crane’s own paraphrases for “At Melville’s Tomb.” Let’s return here to the question posed above, namely, What’s so puzzling about Crane? It is hardly surprising that Crane’s work should (in Steven’s formulation) “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” given that the poems comprise strings of gemlike phrases that Crane grouped through intuition rather than reason—so often an excellent recipe for gobbledygook. Yet Crane’s best poems—many of the lyrics in White Buildings, for example—do hold together in a way that much of The Bridge does not. Winters’s notion of paraphrasable content comes closest to locating the crux. Winters was excellent at discovering the key to a poem (no small feat in the case of Valéry, Stevens, Tate, or Crane!). Whether or not one agrees with Winters, his glosses work: “Repose of Rivers” is a riparian monologue; Allen Tate’s “The Subway” is a hellish look at a subway car shuttling underground. Why is it that these poems hold together, while others do not? I believe it has to do with the balance between reason and intuition. Tate writes of this balance in his most famous essay “Tension in Poetry”: The
Metaphysical poet as a rationalist begins at or near the extensive or
denotating end of the line; the romantic Symbolist poet at the other,
intensive end; and each by a straining feat of the imagination tries to
push his meanings as far as he can towards the opposite end, so as to
occupy the entire scale. Judgments,
then, about the success or failure of the Romantic-Symbolist intensive
aspect of a poem and its relation to reason are a matter of scale, and
paraphrase—not a word-for-word gloss but an accounting of the underlying
tonal and rhetorical unity of the poem to which all of the parts must be
accountable—is an excellent litmus test. If too much of a poem eludes
this simple test, then it’s anybody’s guess what the poet is on about. Crane
himself was concerned that people would find his poems the work of someone
who “merely fancied juggling words and images until [he] found something
novel, or esoteric.” Readers have spent enough time with the poems now
to know that their underpinnings, the framework of their subject matter
(especially in the shorter poems), is largely sound—love, desire, death.
Crane’s genius for metaphor pushed language to new limits, working his
correspondences into the very fabric of the language itself, into jeweled
phrases and musical movements that reason cannot fully fathom. He has
given us “adagios of islands,” “sapphire arenas of the hills,” and
“azure steeps,” this last a phrase taken from “At Melville’s
Tomb,” one of his finest lyrics:
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge If,
as I have suggested, this poem succeeds as one of Crane’s best, it
should, therefore, pass the test of paraphrasable content. Pinsky is on
the right track, though he falls short of elucidating the entire poem. I
offer a paraphrase only hesitatingly, since, as I have said, Crane’s
poems test the very notion of paraphrasable content. Still, I think that
“At Melville’s Tomb” does answer to it. Crane himself elucidates
many of the specific images in his letter to Monroe. More generally, the
poem is a rumination on death in the tradition of Herbert’s “Church
Monuments,” though with a decidedly romantic bent. More than simply his
grave site in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, Melville’s tomb—the
terrible one described in his novels and the one from which he drew his
“chapters”—was the sea, and the sea here is a figure for death:
drowned men’s bones, wrecks that fail to hear their warning bells,
portents of death’s bounty. As in Herbert, death is then depicted as
quiet, calm, featureless, devoid of the striving against “further
tides.” The end strikes me as quite romantic indeed: death as a kind of
sleep, the “fabulous shadow” (is it the shade of the mariner or death
itself?) that only the sea keeps. Eliot
wrote somewhere that good poets write from their experience, from the
things that happen to them, while great poets write of things that have
yet to happen. It is impossible, given Crane’s own death by drowning,
not to consider whether, in some uncanny way, he had foreseen his farthest
tides and scattered chapters.
Editor's Note: Portions of this article were originally presented as part of “Reckoning with Hart Crane,” a celebration of The Library of America’s Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters, edited by Langdon Hammer, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City on October 23, 2006. |
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