It is also worth noting that Winters’s piece, while it is far more illuminative of what was going on, because it is more articulate about its anti-Emerson, anti-Whitman, and finally anti-American position (as well as those European currents, like Mallarmé, that Winters saw as supporting it) than many others, was also practically without influence — because it was all but unavailable from the time Winters wrote it until the sixties.
But Blackmur’s “Notes on a Text of Hart Crane,” an essay which, despite its criticism, is probably as responsible as any other for Crane’s endurance, basically takes the same tack and was widely available from the time of its publication in 1935 through Blackmur’s arrival at Princeton in 1940 and his vast popularity as a critic ever since. (It is still available today in Blackmur’s Form and Value in Modern Poetry.) That essay begins:
It is a striking and disheartening fact that the three most ambitious poems of our time should all have failed in similar ways: in composition, in independent objective existence, and in intelligibility of language. The Waste Land, the Cantos, and The Bridge all fail to hang together structurally in the sense that “Prufrock,” “Envoi,” and “Praise for an Urn”—lesser works in every other respect — do hang together.
Today, the general consensus on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound has wholly reversed; since studies of Eliot and Pound by critics like Elizabeth Drew and Hugh Kenner, Blackmur’s pronouncement tinkles like a quaint bell, a bit out of tune, from the past. The consensus on Crane, however, has not. But, as Edelman has argued, we best go back to the early critics of Crane in order to commence whatever rehabilitation we might wish to undertake.
Winters accused Crane of following linguistic impulses, rather than intentionally creating his ideas — of automatic writing, rather than careful articulation of meanings — unaware that all writing (even the most logical and articulate) is, in some sense, automatic. But the fact is, what Winters says of Crane is perfectly true. Where Winters is wrong is in his assumption that there is another, intention-centered, consciousness-bound, teleographical approach to the creation of poetry in particular and writing in general that is, somehow, actually available to the poet/writer other than as a metaphor or as a provisional construct dictated by the political moment. The teleology Winters could not find in Whitman’s pantheism is ultimately not to be had anywhere.
All sentences move toward logic and coherence — or, indeed, toward whatever their final form — by a kind of chance and natural selection. The sentence moves toward other qualities of the poetic in the same manner. Intention, consciousness, and reason are not a triumvirate that impels or creates language. Rather they sit in judgment of the performance after the fact, somewhere between mind and mouth, thought and paper, accepting or rejecting the language offered up; and — when they reject it — they are only able to wait for new language they find more fitting for the tasks to hand. But while intention, consciousness, and reason can halt speech (sometimes), there is some other, ill-understood faculty of mind that fountains up “that virtual train of fires upon jewels” (Mallarmé, translated and quoted by the disapproving Winters) that is poetic language as much as it is analytical prose: It is something associative, rhetorical, dictational — and always almost opaque to analysis. Intention, consciousness, and reason can only make a request of it, humbly and hesitantly — a request to which that faculty may or may not respond, as if it were possessed of an intention wholly apart from ours — or, more accurately, as if it functioned at the behest of other, ill-understood aspects of mind apart from will or intention or anything like them. One can only hear the resonances of a word after it has been uttered, read its associations after it has been written; and, judging such associations and resonances, intention, consciousness, and reason can at best allow language to pass or not to pass. And from what we know of Crane, he was as much at pains to guide his poetic output as any writer in the language. But I also believe that a writer who thinks he or she can do anything else is likely to brutalize, if not stifle, his or her output — likely, at any rate, to restrict it to something less than it might be.
When, in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot made his famous call for “depersonalization” in poetry —
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness through his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, and continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition…
— to the extent that the process of the poet is one with the poet’s progress through the sentences which make up her or his poem, I suspect Eliot was referring to the identical process I spoke of above, involving at least the provisional suspension of intention, consciousness, and reason, i.e., personality. Moreover I suspect Winters recognized it as such. And on the strength of that recognition, he condemned the author.
In his book Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text, the late Thomas Yingling cites a passage from Crane’s 1925 essay, “General Aims and Theories,” as expressing the very opposite of what Eliot, above, was calling for. Crane put together these notes for Eugene O’Neill when O’Neill was contemplating writing an introduction to Crane’s first collection, White Buildings: “It seems to me that the poet will accidentally define his times well enough simply by reacting honestly and to the full extent of his sensibilities to the states of passion, experience and rumination that fate forces on him, first hand.”
I think, however, that the notion of an accidental definition, the idea of an honest reaction to the states of passion, experience, and rumination to the full extent of his sensibilities is a poet speaking of, yet again, the identical creative experience in which intention (or whatever produces the “intention” effect), consciousness, and reason must not be employed too early — before there is material for them to accept or reject — and are signs that Crane and Eliot are speaking of the same phenomenon. The difference in how they speak about it has to do with what, as it were, each sees as fueling what I have called that “ill-understood faculty of mind” that first produces language. In 1919, Eliot saw it as literature. In 1925, Crane saw it as passion, experience, and rumination.