To ruminate is, of course, what ruminants do. Its metaphorical extension is not so much thinking, but thinking “over and over”—as the OED reminds us. Repetition is inchoate in the metaphor. If there is a margin for intellection in Crane’s model, it comes under the rubric of “rumination.” And because that model suggests not so much “reading” as “rereading” (as well as the political margins for experience and passion), it is likely to appeal to the modern sensibility more than Eliot’s.
Yingling’s book points up how much of Crane’s “failure” is intricately entailed with the homophobia of his critics — till finally Crane comes to represent more than anything else the most damning case of bad faith among the New Critics, who claimed above all to believe in the separation of the text from the man. But faced with Crane’s homosexuality, as Yingling shows, they simply couldn’t do it. This part of Yingling’s argument one does not in the least begrudge him. Still, his overall thesis would have been stronger if he had been able to historify his discussion, relating (and distinguishing) Crane’s case specifically to (and from) the extraordinarily similar marginalization (and persistence in spite of it) of Poe (1809–1849) — as well as, say, James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882), Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), and Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) — this last, one of the passions of Crane’s adolescence. A book of Johnson’s is recorded as part of Crane’s adolescent library — doubtless the 1915 edition with the introduction by Ezra Pound. Alcoholism was a huge factor in all these poets’ lives — and deaths. Perversion — in the form of pedophilia — haunted both the case of Poe and, only a trifle less so, of Thomson and Dawson. Homosexuality was certainly a factor in Johnson’s life — and may or may not have been involved with the others. And in all cases major attempts were launched after their deaths to establish them as canonical; in all cases the arguments more or less triumphant against them were finally and fundamentally moral. Arguably this was outside Yingling’s interest; still, had Yingling been able to extend his study even to the process by which poets of major canonical interest during their lives — like Edna St. Vincent Millay, a woman, or Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a black man — were, in the years after their deaths, systematically removed from the critical center (finally by the same process that has elevated Crane), he would have given us a major political analysis of canon-formation. But for all the insight he gives us into Crane’s critical treatment, finally the process of establishing a poet or an artist’s reputation is just more complex than Yingling presents it.
In a chapter called “Words” from her wonderfully wide-ranging 1959 study, Poetry: A Modern Guide to Its Understanding and Enjoyment, critic Elizabeth Drew’s terse judgment on Crane’s address to the bridge is that it is an example of rhetoric “out of place” (p. 73). Briefly she compares it to James Thomson’s (not B.V.) (1700–1748) inflated address to a pineapple in The Seasons (1726–30):
For Drew the simple juxtaposition is enough to damn both poets. Both, for her, are inflated and preposterous. One wonders, however, if Drew isn’t — possibly unconsciously — following Poe’s critique of the young American poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), a near contemporary of Keats, who died at age 25 and whose poems his friend the poet Fitzgreen Halleck published in 1836, sixteen years after Rodman’s death. In his famous review of the two poets’ work, Poe calls the invocation to Drake’s poem, “Niagara” (“Roar, raging torrent! And thou, mighty river, / Pour thy white foam on the valley below! / Frown, ye dark mountains,” etc.), “ludicrous — and nothing more. In general, all such invocations have an air of the burlesque.” But finally one wonders, with all three poems, if it is not the fact that all three examples are apostrophes (rather than the elaborateness of the language in which the apostrophes are couched) that controls the “out of place”-ness — or ludicrousness — of the figures. Wouldn’t the most colloquial, “You, waterfall!” “Hey, pineapple!” or “Yo, Bridge!” strike us as equally ludicrous or out of place?
Critic Harold Bloom has recounted (in his 1982 study Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, p. 270) how, at age ten (revised down from eleven in an earlier version of the essay, published in Alan Trachtenberg’s collection of essays on Crane), he first read, “crouched over Crane’s book in a Bronx library” sometime in the thirties, the same lines Drew denigrates. For Bloom (and, he explains, many others in that decade) they were what “cathected” him onto poetry. Like’s Marlowe’s rhetoric, Bloom argues, Crane’s was both “a psychology and a knowing, rather than a knowledge.” Begged as a present from his sister when he was twelve, Crane’s poems were the first book Bloom owned.
I recall my first reading of those lines too — as a teenager in the late fifties. (For me, Crane’s poems were among the first trade paperbacks I purchased for myself.) I suspect that, like Bloom, I was not too sure what the lines actually meant; but in dazzling me — for dazzle me they did — they established the existence of a gorgeous meta-language that held my judgment on it in suspension precisely because I could not judge the meaning, even as it was clear this meta-language, as it welcomed glorious and sensual words into itself from as far a-field as the Bible, the cowboy film, and the dictionary’s most unthumbed pages (“thou,” “cognizance,” “lariat,” “encinctured”…), welcomed equally such figures as the apostrophe — even more out of favor in the fifties and sixties than it is today. What this language was in the process of knowing — the psychology it proffered — was that of an animate object world, a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else — and thus the apostrophe (the means by which the poet joined in with this mysterious dialogue and antiphon) was, in that sense, at its center.
I also remember, even more forcefully, the lines that, for me — at sixteen — sent chills racing over me and, a moment later, struck me across the bridge of my nose with a pain sharp enough to make my eyes water. It came with the lines from “Harbor Dawn” that Crane the lyricist of unspeakable love had just managed to speak:
For suddenly I realized that “you” was another man!
One should also note, however, I had all but the same bodily reaction to my first encounter — at about the same age — with Ernest Dowson’s “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” though the object there was clearly heterosexual — a female prostitute.
The point with Crane, however, was that there was a critical dialogue already in place around him, that could sustain the resonances of that response in the growing reader — whether that reader was Harold Bloom or I.
But while nearly everyone seems to have ravaged Dowson’s poems for titles[35] (Gone with the Wind, The Night Is Thine, Days of Wine and Roses, Love and Sleep…), no dialogue about the significance of Dowson, no argument over the meaning of the tradition he inhabited and developed, remains in place, save a few wistful comments by Yeats, and the bittersweet memoir by J. Arthur Symons that introduces at least one edition of Dowson’s poems. What’s there is a monologue, not a dialogue. And it is all too brief.
35
Crane also supplies his range of titles: Tennessee Williams’s play