ROBERT GRAVES, LAURA RIDING, JOHN CROWE RANSOM, ALLEN TATE, HART CRANE
Some poets laughed at reinvention and change. In the end it found them out. Robert Graves declared, “Experimental work, as such, has no future. Last year’s experimental poem is as out of date as last year’s hat and there must come a time, perhaps not very many years hence, when there will be a nostalgic reaction from futurism to some sort of traditionalism, and in the end, back will come the Miltonic sonnet, the Spenserian stanza and the mock-heroic epic in the style of Pope.”
When as a young man Graves called on Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, he was startled to learn that the old poet revised his poems very little, subjecting them at most to three or four drafts. Graves, even at that time, was a reviser par excellence, endlessly adjusting and altering, often years after a poem’s first emergence into language. His acumen for revision extended to other works of literature. In 1933 he prepared a “condensation” of David Copperfield; in 1934 he wrote the novel I, Claudius, an historical distillation. He was also a free translator from classical, Celtic and Oriental texts, and even in his criticism he attempts to impose, if not detect, order and system. His fidgety insistence on forming and re-forming, on revision rather than vision, is central to his work, in which he seems bent on moving closer and closer to the elusive final statement. “I should define a good poem as one that makes complete sense; and says all it has to say memorably and economically; and has been written for no other than poetic reasons.”
And the effect he produces? Edgell Rickword praised the poems in The Pier-Glass, his sixth collection, published in 1921 when the poet was only twenty-six. “The cleanness of Mr Graves’s technique was from the first remarkable. His words are young and vigorous, carrying no more than their own weight of flesh. His rhythms, always apparently simple, possess those subtle variations, which a poet alone can introduce, making of a stock metre a personal instrument.” Craftsmanship (he hated the word “technique,” which leaves no room for “magic”) gives the poems an air of classical impersonality. Their effect depends on the power of word and rhythm (generally traditional meters) to evoke experience, not on stimuli to the senses, visual or otherwise; not on qualities of “image” but on qualities of language. In his best poems, statement is inseparable from the words used: paraphrase is not an option. One critic calls him “the last pure lyric poet in English.” He refused to make concessions to the spirit of his age and his poems do something different from those of his major contemporaries. This difference has led to his neglect. He is old-fashioned not like Housman or Philip Larkin or Charles Causley, but like Ben Jonson, Herrick, his beloved Rochester and, from an earlier age, Skelton. He proposes an ancient mission for poetry, an earnest and delighted engagement with language. The poems and poet are in exile, speaking from beyond our borders, as though from the past. His experience and survival of the First World War darken his imagination. War hangs over many of the poems, though it did not disfigure his psyche as it did David Jones’s. He experienced an acute sense of the arbitrariness, loneliness, even the unworthiness of his survival. The memory of war is heavy with personal consequence. It does not, however, as in Edmund Blunden’s case, bind him to the community of the dead: it sets him apart among the living. His comes to seem a charmed, a chosen life. He was liberated into exile: his poem “The Survivor” tells how survival altered the world into which he survived. “The Cloak” tells of a self-exiled peer, not exactly Graves and yet Graves at the same time: “This nobleman is at home anywhere, / His castle being, the valet says, his title.” Poet, survivor, lover:
Has he no friend at court to intercede?
He wants none: exile’s but another name
For an old habit of non-residence
In all but the recesses of his cloak.
Graves’s “old habit of non-residence” was prompted by a love of the Mediterranean and by a rejection of industry and its dehumanizing technologies, the desecration of native landscape, a modern devaluing of relationships and standards. He speaks of this sometimes with contempt, more often with nostalgic concern, in poems such as “On Dwelling.” Rather than stay at home and endure cultural impoverishment, or resist ironically as Betjeman did, he retired, sending back messages of his and our progress. A retrospective radical, not a reactionary, he longs for an unregainable world that went with the war, or perhaps earlier with his attaining puberty: a private battle, lost long ago. He fought on. In “The Cuirassiers of the Frontier” the guards at the outposts of empire embody that empire’s values, its soul. Rome, the heart of empire, festers. The empire is in the Cuirassiers, though they are not in it.
Robert Ranke Graves was born in London in 1895, son of an Irish poet, songwriter and folklorist. He grew up in a highly literate household. He was admired in his pram by Swinburne. Before he went to Charterhouse School he was writing. An early poem on the “temptation to digress... This was about the mocking interruption of a poet’s privacy by a star...” he claims was his first, written when he was thirteen:
I sat in my chamber yesternight,
I lit the lamp, I drew the blind
And I took my pen in hand to write;
But boisterous winds had rent the blind
And you were peering from behind—
Peeping Tom in the skies afar,
Bold, inquisitive, impudent star!
He went to St. John’s College, Oxford, but the war interrupted his education. He joined the British Expeditionary Force and served in France, where he was wounded and suffered from shell shock. He was reported dead; indeed, he read his own obituary in The Times before his twenty-first birthday, and a few days later the recantation: “August 6th, 1916, Officer previously reported died of wounds now reported wounded, Graves, Capt. R., Royal Welch Fus.”
To get on with serious creative work, he decided to write some popular books. His first success was Good-bye to All That (1929), a candid autobiographical account of his early years, the war, and the breakdown of his first marriage. He describes various attempts to earn a living between the end of the war and his withdrawal to Majorca, a move that the book itself facilitated. His candor was not complete, however: the book does not detail the huge change his life was undergoing.
Collections of his poems began appearing in 1916—Over the Brazier and Goliath and David contained war poems of considerable accomplishment, though not naked and politicized like those of his war friend, Siegfried Sassoon. In 1917 Fairies and Fusiliers appeared. He was trying to go deeper, seeking a truth that hovers between extreme alternatives, and managing to sound like Walter de la Mare. There is a blithe irony about some of the war poems. Country Sentiments (1919) is weary, retiring into pastoral. The early poetry, as well as using conventional forms, deploys ballads and nursery-rhyme rhythms and forms: “Allie, call the birds in, / The birds from the sky!” Their engaging, disturbing playfulness presents war in a stark, simplified form. Graves was an Edward Marsh Georgian through and through, deploying a conventional, adjectival idiom. Later revisions tempered and tightened some poems; others he simply (and not always justifiably) discarded.
In time he came to feel the constriction of his conventional modes, as of his life in England, the limiting choices with which he had hedged himself about.
Every choice is always the wrong choice,
Every vote cast is always cast away—
How can truth hover between alternatives?
He engaged in serious academic work and in fanciful researches into the creative process and the importance of the unconscious in creative activity. For a period he believed writing poetry was therapy. The firm poetic vocation he had taken into the trenches was still firm, but altered. It had lost direction. He explored what he called “poetic unreason,” investigated modernism and reacted harshly against the work of H.D. and the Imagists. It was a time for saying no, no to the false gods and the lesser idols: to “sick, muddle-headed, sex-mad D. H. Lawrence who wrote sketches for poems, but nothing more”; and ‘’poor, tortured Gerard Manley Hopkins.” It was a time to pontificate, and to include himself in his censure. “Young poets tend to be either ambitious, or anxious to keep up with fashion. Both these failings—failings only where poetry is concerned, because they are advantages in the business world and in most of the professions—encourage him to have designs on the public. The attempt to keep up with fashion will lead him to borrow the style of whatever poet is most highly approved at the time... Now, I have known three generations of John Smiths. The type breeds true. John Smith II and III went to the same school, university and learned profession as John Smith I. Yet John Smith I wrote pseudo-Swinburne; John Smith II wrote pseudo-Brooke; and John Smith III is now writing pseudo-Eliot. But unless John Smith can write John Smith, however unfashionable the result, why does he bother to write at all? Surely one Swinburne, one Brooke, or one Eliot are enough in any age?”
How was Robert Graves to write Robert Graves? The tension in his poetry changed: the craftsman had been drawn toward aestheticism; now he was becoming metaphysician, psychologist (his Freudian Poetic Unreason was published in 1925) and wayward philosopher. He has wild theories. Meter originates with Irish hammers on anvils, ti-tum; whereas Old English stress patterns derive from rowing, and their verse was unrhymed “because the noise of rowlocks does not suggest rhyme.” He speaks of Chaucer and Skelton reconciling “the anvil with the oar.” “The rules of prosody apply only to anvil verse, or to sacred-dance verse, in which every syllable is evaluated and counted.” Later he had wonderful theories about the ballad. He was moving from innocence to different sorts of knowledge, including false knowledge. He returned to innocence at the end—a passionate, aroused, old age of innocence, intensified and elegized by experience.
In late 1926 Graves’s life abruptly altered. He had been corresponding with the American poet Laura Riding and invited her to join him and his wife on a journey to Egypt. She arrived and took him in hand, as a poet and as a man. Through her severe ministrations he at last pulled clear of the traumatized war years. What he called “the strong pulling of her bladed mind” left no area of his concerns untouched, untransformed. He even read cummings and (at last) Hopkins with pleasure.
Laura Riding, née Reichenthal, was born in New York in 1901. At Cornell University she began to write poems; she married a history instructor, and moved with him to the University of Louisville. Her “lost” early poems were rediscovered and published in 1992. One that may date from her time at Cornell reveals the talent fully formed, with a sense of phrase and pause that is breathtaking:
A city seems between us. It is only love,
Love like a sorrow still
After a labor, after light.
The crowds are one.
Sleep is a single heart
Filling the old avenues we used to know
With miracles of dark and dread
We dare not go to meet
Save as our own dead stalking
Or as two dreams walking
One tread and terrible,
One cloak of longing in the cold,
Though we stand separate and wakeful
Measuring death in miles between us
Where a city seems and memories
Sleep like a populace.
The relentless unfolding of the sentence, miming time and theme, and the curiously right variability of phrasing, would have arrested any editor. Poems begin with lines like “Come to me for truth,” “I have been with the trees all day,” “Your voice more than any song a song.” She became involved with the Fugitive Group, having submitted poems to their magazine and caught the eye of Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, the prime movers and most substantial poets in the movement. Tate in particular responded to her intelligence but stood in awe of her conviction. Robert Graves admired her enigmatic poem “The Quids,” which he read—perhaps as an individualist or anti-populist statement—in the year of her first book publication, The Close Chaplet, and they fell into correspondence. Graves invited her to England. The rest followed from there.
“Truth,” she declared, was her objective in life as in language. Poetry was to be the means. For twenty years she tried to make it so. “Her finest poems,” says Robert Nye, her editor, “seem to me to be those in which she makes discovery as she writes, poems in which the heart’s and mind’s truth comes more as something learned than something taught.” This is astute; it goes as much for Riding as for Graves: their didactic mode can be hectoring. He also comments on the English quality of her voice. Her onetime friend Gertrude Stein always has an American inflection, but Riding can sound English, and indeed her spoken inflection was at once slow and clipped.
“The Troubles of a Book,” “Come, Words, Away,” “As Many Questions as Answers,” “Nor is it written that you may not grieve” and more than a score of other poems set this poet apart and above many reputations that loom larger. But after two decades’ writing she had said what she could in verse and it was not enough. In 1939 she abandoned poetry, explaining her decision at length and amplifying her explanation in the years that followed. She abandoned Graves and returned to America, where she devoted her remaining half century (she died in 1991) to Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, undertaken initially with Schuyler B. Jackson, whom she married in 1941 and with whom she lived until his death in 1968. Laura (Riding) Jackson, as she now styled herself, continued in her poetryless later years to insist on the truth quest; also trying to establish, against dozens of misreadings, the biographical and bibliographical truth of her relationship with Robert Graves, which continually seemed to be going out of focus.
Riding’s and Graves’s names were closely associated from 1925 to 1939, and Laura Riding, with her character and intellect, changed not only Graves but other, lesser writers, as she was to affect Auden, too, and Ted Hughes and John Ashbery later on. To a rudderless Graves she preached craft as a servant of truth, an instrument of revelation. The poet was not a witty entertainer, a word player, but a truth teller, or he was nothing. No true poem could be manufactured: it had to be discovered in the language. Michael Roberts (1902–1948), the anthologist, essayist and not inconsiderable poet, summarized her stance: “Poetry is the final residue of significance in language, freed from extrinsic decoration, superficial contemporaneity, and didactic bias.” She helped Roberts draft the introduction to the definitive anthology of its time, the Faber Book of Modern Verse, insisting there that “the poetic use of language can cause discord as easily as it can cure it. A bad poem, a psychologically disordered poem, if it is technically effective may arouse uneasiness or nausea or anger in the reader.” The poet has actual power over readers and must work with care. She rejected the growing prejudice in favor of “voice” in poetry, suggesting that the voice that matters is that of “a man talking to men” rather than “this particular man” talking to men. The eccentric individuation of her contemporaries repelled her: their writing put personality before language in a spirit of self-display, corrupting the valid mission of poetry. She could be a generously strict taskmaster, as I discovered over a decade of correspondence with her. She expected the best, which is something a little better than any individual could possibly deliver.
In Graves, who loved her, she had much to work on. His early style is decorated and metaphorical, and these “bad” elements had to go. She led him back from the Corinthian, even the Baroque, to the Doric, the timeless core. She had to get rid of the occasionally wooden diction and help him purge the “superficial contemporaneity and didactic bias” which infected his war poems and some of the subsequent writings.
With Laura Riding, Graves prepared A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927). Percy Simpson had been a tutor of Graves’s at Oxford. He was author of Shakespeare’s Punctuation, and his kinds of analysis lay behind Riding and Graves’s analysis of Shakespeare’s 129th Sonnet, a reading that deeply influenced William Empson in writing Seven Types of Ambiguity and hence affected the critical (and creative) habits of two or more generations. One idea in the Survey is particularly relevant to Graves’s work: “The reader should enter the life of the poem and submit himself to its conditions to know it as it really is.” Adopting the impersonality—or neutrality—that the poet has adopted, the reader must accept before he can know.
The turbulent and often fruitful relationship with Laura Riding, and with the poets and artists who came to Majorca to be with this extraordinary pair, ended in 1939. By that time they had been significant publishers with the Seizin Press, which had issued Epilogue and work by Gertrude Stein and James Reeves as well as their own. They provided a kind of informal writing school, revised and winnowed Graves’s early work, and wrote poems, stories, novels and criticism. Biographers have had a field day with their lives, but there is a degree of impertinence in their speculations. They distract attention from the writing and they sensationalize areas that can strictly never be understood. Who is “monstrous,” for example, when a woman and a married man fall in love? Somehow blame always seems to attach to the woman: her actions are narrowly watched and read with cruel censure.
With the Second World War, Riding and Graves had to leave the island where they had spent ten years writing, publishing, editing, polemicizing. In 1956 Graves returned and set up permanent residence there. His most provocative book of the post-Riding years was The White Goddess (1946, extended and amended 1952 and 1961, corrected 1997), a “historical grammar of poetic myth.” His thesis is that poetry is written in thrall to the Muse: the White Goddess. She is a figure defined in some of the poems, notably “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” which celebrates her omnipresence and her ineffable quality, and in “The White Goddess.” Reviled by saints and sober men, she is the lady of extremes, vitality, imbalance: creative and destructive, she lives within and outside the individual, she burns off all but his capacity for love. She has no constant rules, she is “sister of the mirage and the echo.” Through her, Graves externalizes and mythologizes his own tensions, as Yeats did in A Vision. The myth expresses his extremely personal vision—a constructed vision rather than an instinctive one. This goddess later on developed a dark-skinned sister. Although Graves makes much of the white and the dark goddesses, he never finally trusts himself to them, or not for long.
The power of sexual love, its fulfillment and denial, brought the goddess into being. In 1965 Graves wrote, “My theme has always been the practical impossibility, transcended only by miracle, of absolute love continuing between man and woman.” The distance between “practical impossibility” and “miracle” led to the goddess with whom he could will or imagine into being a relationship. One of his most beautiful love poems, “Love without Hope,” rises to celebration. Most of the poems relate to this theme.
Formal experiment in Graves’s work usually occurs well within the bounds of tradition. There is no startling innovation in his verse—indeed, what startles is the authority with which he deploys the subject matter and imagery of romantic love poetry in the present age and with entirely contemporary authority—the effortless contemporaneity of the timeless. This is indeed “Love Respelt.” The pared quality of the language, the weighing and placing of words replete with meaning in a well-judged context, and the management of strongly colloquial rhythms built on a traditional prosodic base make for the unostentatious brilliance of his poems, which would be as comprehensible and affecting to Jonson or Gray as they are to us. “Love is the echoing mind, as in the mirror / We stare on our dazed trunks at the block kneeling.”
In his late poems he developed a precision reminiscent of the epigrammatic style of pieces in the Greek Anthology. It’s a poetry that distrusts facility in language and in feeling and still, with the poet’s memory failing and his body no longer obedient to desire, engages the durable joys and virtues, as in “The Green Flash”:
Nightfall is no mere failure of sunlight:
Wait for the green flash, for the exact instant
That your sun plummets into sea;
And breathe no wish—wishes are born of weakness—
When green, Love’s own hilarious tincture
Welcomes the sacred mystagogues of Night:
Owls, planets, dark oracular dreams.
He died in 1985.
An earlier poem, “In Broken Images,” expresses the distinction between the true and the facile poet, the one who knows what he has to say before he begins and the one who discovers as he writes: “He becomes dull, trusting his clear images: / I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.” Trust is best invested in the senses: “He in a new confusion of his understanding; / I in a new understanding of my confusion.” There is Socratic hubris in all this, yet the voice persuades us. The irony is that this poem, celebrating the aleatoric, fragmentary and unpredictable, is itself in a consistent, even a contrived, argumentative form. The most lucid development of the theme is in “The Cool Web,” Graves’s most popular poem and one of his best.
Formal skill, then, seems at times to run against his themes and critical cavils—and yet formal certainty is the only certainty he has. It overlies, or draws together, uncertainties, clarifying areas of confusion. From the tumbling uncertainties of feeling and the ephemeral epiphanies of the senses he wrests occasional compelling celebrations of love. “Counting the Beats,” in a compact, repetitive form with a taut vocabulary and a tentative, experiential directness, is among his outstanding lyrics. The poems illuminate, sometimes dazzlingly, small areas in chaos made coherent, resolve contradictions, reconcile one set of alternatives. Beyond each poem darkness forms again. Or the poet comes up against a mirror and finds he’s been traveling in the wrong direction, into the self. “Loving True, Flying Blind” summarizes his thematic career:
...no soft “if,” no “either-or,”
Can keep my obdurate male mind
From loving true and flying blind.
Reflecting on the neglect of his generation by academic critics, he remarked, “We were all equally post-Canonical.” More vehemently he declares that theirs was not the “Age of Consolidation” but the “Age of Acquiescence.” In the end, “The only demands that a poet can make from his public are that they treat him with consideration, and expect nothing from him; and do not make a public figure of him—but rather, if they please, a secret friend.” He did not acquiesce, though—who knows—without Laura Riding he might have.
The Fugitives, to whom Laura Riding sent her early poems from Louisville, are one of the rare groups of American poets who defined a course and extended it while keeping its direction. It was not an apprenticeship like Imagism but a continuing (if altering) shared vocation. It defined itself in the magazine The Fugitive, which ran from 1922 to 1925 (nineteen issues) and carried little but poetry, poetry and poetry, with a brief editorial, and a small review section. In 1928, Fugitives: An Anthology of Verse was published in New York and the movement was technically over.
Part of its dynamic was political. It was Southern, it issued in an agrarian ideology which, depending on your perspective, can be seen as radical or terminally conservative. It had certain chips on its shoulder, not least a sense of undeserved neglect: Chicago, New York and London were the literary bourses, and Nashville, Tennessee, just wasn’t on the map. It also had some fine poets and critics associated with it, in particular John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, and in Robert Penn Warren one of the most influential critic-editors of the century. Millions of schoolchildren, myself among them, learned to read poetry through his anthology Understanding Poetry, edited with Cleanth Brooks. With Brooks he founded the Southern Review and spearheaded the “New Criticism,” which Ransom first articulated, devoted to close reading of texts along formal and ahistorical lines, another outgrowth of the original Fugitive enterprise. Poems are objects that exist beyond their historical context, are whole in themselves and contain their own justification. A poem proposes the terms on which we are to read and appraise it. We distinguish between structure and texture, between the grammar and the argument on the one hand and the imagery, diction and rhyme on the other. This is tenor and vehicle in a rather more rudimentary form, but serviceable for much verse, though not all. It omits elements of merely subjective assessment, which is fine, but it also excludes moral and political judgment. An achieved work has its own integrity. Ransom was unable to live up to the demands of his theories when he rejected the work of Robert Duncan on specifically sexual grounds.
Fugitive apologists claim that this group, and not the Imagists, more decisively shaped modern American poetic styles. This strikes impartial readers as absurd; but undeniably reading styles were affected by the very successful New Critical movement, and certainly the emergence in the late 1970s of the weary New Formalism would have been unthinkable without it.
“Fugitive” implied dissent and departure from the disorder of the modern, and a sense of being hunted by a hostile law and surviving against the odds. They were fleeing too from “the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South.” They were all friends and there is a jovial sense of conspiracy in the risks they took. Ransom was the first to emerge mature, a fine if minor poet, subtle in control of form and diction, cautious and caustic. The body of poetic work he chose to preserve is small, succinct in all its parts, fine single poems rather than “poetry” in the more sweeping Romantic or modern sense. Riding was the only woman admitted to the group, and she was never really a part of it in the way the others were—or rather, it never became a part of her. Hart Crane also featured in the magazine, but only because of Tate’s passionate advocacy.
Ransom was the conservative, even the reactionary; reluctant in “an unseemlier world,” he always required persuading. He was also the finest, if not the most ambitious, of the poets. After attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville he was a Rhodes scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, where he came to recognize himself as “in manners aristocratic; in religion, ritualistic; in art, traditional.” Most of his poems were written in the Fugitive years, between 1922 and 1926, though he was born in 1888 and already established when the movement began. He lived until 1974, one of the great teachers of his time and an important editor whose achievements include Kenyon Review, in which he was able to include critical writing by William Empson, R. P. Blackmur and many of the old Fugitive guard. In 1941 he wrote The New Criticism.
Allen Tate (1899–1979), the youngster, taken on board while still a student at Vanderbilt, was the firebrand. He liked and defended The Waste Land against Ransom; he stood up to the master. He was the “Easterner” among these men of the South (an “Easterner” born in Kentucky!), yet his “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” “against” which Lowell later wrote “For the Union Dead,” is the great Southern poem of the first half of the century, great in scope and in technical resource. It is no wonder that Robert Lowell, disaffected with Boston, his family, his heritage and his church, sought out Tate when, a literal fugitive, he fled Harvard. From Tate he learned that “a good poem had nothing to do with exalted feelings of being moved by the spirit”: it was (Graves would have agreed) “a piece of craftsmanship.” And that craftsmanship had to reveal itself as craftsmanship, not the art that conceals art.
Tate had a curious habit in his diction of using words in unexpected combinations and stripping them of their usual semantic nuances. The context gave each word a single meaning. This disruption of conventional syntax, this new-minting of words, had an abiding impact on Lowell and Randall Jarrell and affected Geoffrey Hill as well. Tate knew and liked Eliot; Ford Madox Ford championed him. He was close to Hart Crane, and was one of the few friends and critics who stood by Crane’s reputation after his death. Tate is a complex and serious poet, often obscure—a poet’s poet. In his criticism (but this is true of most Fugitive and post-Fugitive prose) there is an awkward argumentativeness and a rhetorical elevation, not like Eliot’s secure patrician tone, which makes us all patricians with him, but schoolmasterly and a little over where he assumes our heads are likely to be. Like Ransom, he was a great teacher; but though his poetry is on an entirely different scale from his master’s, Ransom’s poems will weather time better than his, and will be loved by general readers as well as other poets.
Hart Crane was Tate’s exact contemporary, born in 1899, drowned in 1932. He was born in Ohio, of contentious parents whose animosities harmed him. At sixteen he had a poem accepted by a New York magazine and the die was cast. The next year his parents separated and he went to New York, to lose himself in the artistic and unorthodox social world of Greenwich Village. He made contacts, then returned to Ohio, trying to work in his father’s chocolate business and reading and writing all the time. He read Eliot and Pound. In 1923 he was back in the Village, making his way by copywriting. Alcoholic, homosexual (or homosexual, alcoholic) in 1920s America, he began to lose his way.
Thou canst read nothing except through appetite
And here we join eyes in that sanctity
Where brother passes brother without sight,
But finally knows conviviality...
Go then, unto thy turning and thy blame.
Seek bliss then, brother, in my moment’s shame.
All this that balks delivery through words
Shall come to you through words prescribed by swords:
That hate is but the vengeance of a long caress,
And fame is pivotal to shame with every sun
That rises on eternity’s long willingness...
So sleep, dear brother, in my fame, my shame undone.
Against the compelling pessimism of Eliot’s The Waste Land, which he admired, he decided in a Rilkean or Whitmanesque spirit to be a celebrator. “I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble towards a more positive, or (if I must put it so in a skeptical age) ecstatic goal.” Behind Eliot was Whitman, but Crane could not manage the release of his fluent lines.
Yes, Walt,
Afoot again, and onward without halt,—
Not soon, nor suddenly,—No, never to let go
My hand
in yours,
Walt Whitman—
so—
Melville was always there, too, both men who shared with him an open secret and a range of images.
He wrote the brilliant and difficult poem The Bridge, and his first book, White Buildings, was published in 1926. He traveled to Europe, meeting in London with one of his English admirers, Edgell Rickword, who remembers how brief the meeting was, Crane being keen to get down to the docks and try out the rougher nightlife. He went to Paris and touched a different and populous Bohemia. The Bridge appeared in 1930 and with a grant in 1931 he went to Mexico, intending to compose a major poem on the conquest. After a complicated time there, having fallen in love with a woman and trying to alter his nature, he set off on the return journey to America in 1932, committing suicide—it is assumed—in the Gulf of Mexico.
From his earliest poems, Crane takes a different direction from Tate. He uses words with the intention that they carry all their semantic baggage with them. Against the classical temper of Tate’s poems, Crane’s are decidedly romantic. Words slide into one another, association is the dynamic of the diction, and in the process surface clarity is lost. This is, in a sense, “feminist” writing as Hélène Cixous defines it: “libidinal,” working at the level of image and inference and against the predetermined and imposed rigidities of logic. It looks willful, however. The reader who has loved the difficult clarity of the early poems finds The Bridge rebarbative. Crane is romantic in intention and temperament, speaking of his “organic” forms; and yet he constructs his poems, he struggles with his diction, he completes sections and even stanzas out of sequence. He is making not the river but the bridge. His whole oeuvre is a tragic and resonant contradiction in terms. He speaks of “pouring” his words out. They were eked, with pain and genius, out of him.
Yet judging from his letters justifying his practice to Harriet Monroe and others, Crane knew very precisely what he was doing, and that what he was doing was what he wanted to do. He had seen work by the Surrealists; he had watched his own mind in addled states rising into the light and making sense, a different sense perhaps, of the familiar world. His poetry wanted to occupy the kinds of space that Eliot’s and Pound’s did. Yet he had left home and left behind the possibility of further education; he read and read, yet without structure in his reading, without debate and without direction. A poet writing free verse about a local environment might get away with it, but Crane wanted and deserved to exist naturally on a plane with the metropolitan modernists. He should have been an American Lorca. He had the ear for it, perhaps the genius, but he lacked steady sunlight—either love or approbation. In the end his poems were ground out by will. They did not flow from his wonderful imagination. He disliked—he despised—himself. He had failed in his own and in his society’s terms. For Tate and for Yvor Winters he represented genius and also folly, a romantic folly to which Winters nearly succumbed himself, and from which Tate recoiled with fascination. It is no wonder that Crane’s body was never found: it did not want to be. What it left behind is a greater sufficiency than most men achieve. Yet “All this that balks delivery through words” defeated him. As he writes in the closing lines of “At Melville’s Tomb,”
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.