October 2, 2006
Adam Kirsch on Hart Crane in the New Yorker
The interpretation of Crane’s life as a dire fable of the age has shaped his reputation ever since. Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, two of his best friends and two of the best critics of modern American poetry, saw his story primarily as a warning. For Winters, he was a noble spirit destroyed by false principles, “a saint of the wrong religion”; for Tate, his poetry had “incalculable moral value,” but mainly because “it reveals our defects in their extremity.” No wonder Crane remains a special case in the canon of American modernism, his reputation never quite as secure as that of Eliot or Stevens. Langdon Hammer, a professor of English at Yale, and one of Crane’s most intelligent advocates, has written that his poetry “must be repeatedly ‘introduced’ again, brought in, reclaimed. . . . Crane still does not have a place.”
At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. “Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters,” edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature.
[ . . . ]
No poet since Keats had achieved this kind of elated lyricism. In fact, while Crane was a modernist by vocation, he stands more comfortably in the grand tradition of English poetry than most twentieth-century poets do. In an age of free verse, he usually wrote in iambic pentameter and often used rhyme; on the page, his poems look much more conventional than the broken lines of Williams or the somersaults of Cummings. While Crane sometimes sounds like Rimbaud, his work owes less to the French Symbolists—whom he could not read fluently—than to the amplified rhetoric of the Elizabethans, especially Christopher Marlowe. He adored “the glorious cornucopia that Tamburlaine shakes page after page,” and his own verse conveys a similar sense of confused abundance.
At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. “Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters,” edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature.
[ . . . ]
No poet since Keats had achieved this kind of elated lyricism. In fact, while Crane was a modernist by vocation, he stands more comfortably in the grand tradition of English poetry than most twentieth-century poets do. In an age of free verse, he usually wrote in iambic pentameter and often used rhyme; on the page, his poems look much more conventional than the broken lines of Williams or the somersaults of Cummings. While Crane sometimes sounds like Rimbaud, his work owes less to the French Symbolists—whom he could not read fluently—than to the amplified rhetoric of the Elizabethans, especially Christopher Marlowe. He adored “the glorious cornucopia that Tamburlaine shakes page after page,” and his own verse conveys a similar sense of confused abundance.