This is not poetry as personal adventure made public. Rather this is poetry as what civilized people do — and what civilized people interested in the language of the tribe ought from time to time to take a look at, get interested in, and enjoy. But the cumulative effect of thirty, forty, seventy-five pages of Silliman’s work communicates a passion in his exploration/construction of the labyrinths of language as great as — if not greater than — any personal adventure I know of in our epoch.
46. Coleridge begins Chapter Five of his 1817 Biographia Literaria with this observation: “There have been men in all ages who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which they seemed to have formed on the principal of the absence or presence of the will.” One must smile as one sees Coleridge himself eminently characterizable in such a way. Whether it is a universal trait or not, certainly it is a Romantic one. And a hundred-ten years later, in his famous Correspondence with Jacques Rivière, Antonin Artaud might easily have gone to school at Coleridge’s feet, anent precisely this point, as he demands that Rivière enlighten him as to whether or not Artaud’s own form of madness — a collapsing will that prevents him from ever bringing a poem to the perfection demanded by the esthetic of the “unified impression”—can consort with valid, literary creativity.
Is it too gross an observation that writers who are likely to make their personality problems a center for their writerly investigations are the ones whose problem impedes their writing? Certainly there are other writers who are not about to make their own personality problems the center of their intellectual delving. I mean those of us who, in spite of good intentions and common sense, must write. I mean those of us who, sunk in myriad hypochondriachal anxieties and a-swirl in cosmi-comical doubts, move to the typewriter to record a few and by so doing escape so many more. I mean those of us who, when all logic, all our friends, and all the circumstances of our person and the world say (and say truly), you would be a lot better off if you didn’t write but rather did X, Y, or Z, find ourselves picking up a notebook and starting to put down words — and keep at it for hours, for days on end… It still can make me cry to remember my daughter, aged three, running up to me at my desk, tugging at my knee to entreat me, “Daddy! Daddy, don’t write!”—or can simply embarrass me to recall wife one year or lover another passing through the next room with angry steps, while, for the tenth hour of the third day, I sat at the typewriter. This, at any rate, is a problem the contemporary writer is going to hide, going to hope at worst is ignored or at best turned into a virtue by those who come after; but it’s the last problem the writer is going to probe, interrogate, and whose solution he or she will seek to turn into a carefully articulated field for philosophical adventure. But, with its attendant absent-mindedness, preoccupation, and chronic personality absence, this problem causes far more pain, I’m sure, than the other — whether or not it is connected in any way to talent.
47. Certainly I would like it said of me, as it was once said of Maurice Raveclass="underline" He had no secret except the secret of his genius. But what we all fear is that time’s judgment will turn out to be: He had no secrets at all.
Atlantis Rose…
Some Notes on Hart Crane
He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not, — this strong, solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of the cities to the Atlantis… He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.
I
A reading at once sophisticated and rich — of a poem as complex as The Bridge — must start with details and distinctions: the realization, perhaps, that, in Crane’s case, even if they started off one, by the end of his poem, Cathay and Atlantis do not allegorize the same notion: Cathay was the mistaken goal from which Columbus, on his first voyage to the New World, returned, and, after three more, one of which was a major colonization push with 17 ships and 1500 colonists, died unaware he had not found.
Atlantis was the goal of Crane’s own vision.
In 1922 Harold Hart Crane first read Eliot’s The Waste Land in that November’s Dial and conceived his own poem as an answer to Eliot’s that would offer — without any particular jingoistic pretensions — a specifically American affirmation to counter Eliot’s presumably international despair. Crane worked in spurts, on The Bridges “Finale” and other poems, that year and the next, around his job at J. Walter Thompson’s Advertising Agency, where his accounts included Pine Tar Honey, Sloan’s Liniment, and, yes, Naugahyde. Possibly after an incident in which the hung-over Crane threw a lot of perfume out the office window, he quit Thompson’s in October 1923, to spend November and December with sculptor Gaston Lachaise’s stepson John Nagle and writer William Slater Brown at the Rector house in Woodstock, New York.
There, while visiting one evening, Woodstock resident and art critic William Murrell Fisher told Crane about the Viennese-born poet Samuel Bernhard Greenberg (December 13th, 1893-August 16th, 1917), sixth of the eight children and youngest son to Jacob and Hannah Greenberg.
An embroiderer specializing in gold and silver, largely for religious purposes, Jacob Greenberg had brought his family to New York’s Lower East Side when Samuel was four or five. The family moved frequently about the city’s Jewish neighborhood, while during the week Samuel attended Public School 166 at Rivington Street and Suffolk and on Saturdays Hebrew school. Hannah died on February 19th, 1908, and was buried in a Brooklyn cemetery. On the chill funeral day, the family rode back home in a wagon — across the Brooklyn Bridge. Between 1909 and 1911 Samuel lived with his older brother Daniel. In 1910, through his older brother Morris, Samuel met a circle of musicians and artists, including art-critic Fisher, who worked at or were connected with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Daniel and Morris were both serious piano students.)