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Hart Crane: A collection of critical essays
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
About the author
Alan Trachtenberg
62 books16 followersAlan Trachtenberg was Neil Gray, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.
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March 15, 2024
Just a few of us will remember, even fondly remember, this series called "Twentieth Century Views," that was popular with some English major types in the 60s, 70s, and maybe into the 80s (before critical theory took over English Departments and larger social interpretations of literature supplanted a close reading of individual texts). The books in this series were most helpful dealing with difficult authors or difficult texts. I think I have 3 or 4 of them, some that might have been library rejects.
This one, on the one American modernist who has remained opaque to me, Hart Crane, was particularly helpful. It might not have given me much for understanding "The Bridge," but it was very good on the poems preparing me to read the big one. And it gives a sense of Crane's different philosophical positions.
Crane was certainly taken seriously for a long time, but that has seemed to have diminished now. Now we focus, if we try at all, on his obscure diction, twisted syntax, his self-destructive alcoholism, and his gay extravagance, particularly toward the end of his life. And his suicide at 32, of course. The fact that Crane strove, as an autodidact, to find an affirmative response to the negativism of modernism (particularly of "The Wasteland"), doesn't get much play, despite his self conscious assumption of the mantle of Whitman. I think many readers have a hard time accepting Crane's spiritual quest, if they even get far enough to think about that. And then there is the weight of symbolism, the wild subjectivity of it! We have to enter the symbolism of this, its associations, it's deeply personal implications for the poet, if we are to enter the poems. I admit that I have just begun that process. I don't know if I will ever get there, but I'm getting a sense now that the journey might be worthwhile.
One of the essayists here says Crane is the most Blake-ian of the modernists, the poet who prepared us for people like Ginsberg and Robert Duncan. That's interesting and even helps me read Crane.
Here's a quote from Joseph Warren Beach's essay "Hart Crane and Moby Dick:" "Crane tried to make himself a philosophy that would take into account the methods and findings of science and yet pass beyone scientific positivism through spiritual insight."
And here's a quote from Crane himself in his "General Aims and Theories:" "It is part of a poet's business to risk not only criticism--but folly--in the conquest of consciousness."
So this book helped, even if a few essays (oh, say, the one by Harold Bloom!) left me more puzzled than the difficult poems themselves.
This one, on the one American modernist who has remained opaque to me, Hart Crane, was particularly helpful. It might not have given me much for understanding "The Bridge," but it was very good on the poems preparing me to read the big one. And it gives a sense of Crane's different philosophical positions.
Crane was certainly taken seriously for a long time, but that has seemed to have diminished now. Now we focus, if we try at all, on his obscure diction, twisted syntax, his self-destructive alcoholism, and his gay extravagance, particularly toward the end of his life. And his suicide at 32, of course. The fact that Crane strove, as an autodidact, to find an affirmative response to the negativism of modernism (particularly of "The Wasteland"), doesn't get much play, despite his self conscious assumption of the mantle of Whitman. I think many readers have a hard time accepting Crane's spiritual quest, if they even get far enough to think about that. And then there is the weight of symbolism, the wild subjectivity of it! We have to enter the symbolism of this, its associations, it's deeply personal implications for the poet, if we are to enter the poems. I admit that I have just begun that process. I don't know if I will ever get there, but I'm getting a sense now that the journey might be worthwhile.
One of the essayists here says Crane is the most Blake-ian of the modernists, the poet who prepared us for people like Ginsberg and Robert Duncan. That's interesting and even helps me read Crane.
Here's a quote from Joseph Warren Beach's essay "Hart Crane and Moby Dick:" "Crane tried to make himself a philosophy that would take into account the methods and findings of science and yet pass beyone scientific positivism through spiritual insight."
And here's a quote from Crane himself in his "General Aims and Theories:" "It is part of a poet's business to risk not only criticism--but folly--in the conquest of consciousness."
So this book helped, even if a few essays (oh, say, the one by Harold Bloom!) left me more puzzled than the difficult poems themselves.
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