But today — if only because they are unsubtle and generic — there is no reason for the heterosexual critic, male or female, not to have access to the homosexual reading of the work of a poet such as Crane. If anything, it behooves us, in our enthusiasm as gay critics, occasionally to recall just how much rhetorical energy such writers expended in the employment of these forms to ensure that a heterosexual reading was available for their texts.
III
From some thirty years ago I can recall a conversation in which a young poet explained to me how practically every rhetorical aspect of then-contemporary experimental poetry — it was c. 1963—had been foreshadowed forty to forty-five-odd years earlier by T. S. Eliot, either in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” or in The Waste Land. With much page turning and flipping through volumes, it was very impressive.
If any factor contributed most to the image of Crane the lyricist-sometimes-too-ambitious, it was his prosody. Eliot — and Pound, of the quintessentially experimental Cantos — was half in and half out of the traditional English language iambic pentameter measure. And when they were in it, they were often working mightily to make it vanish under the hyper-rhythms of the most ordinary speech. (“What thou lovest well remains…,” that most famous passage in The Pisan Cantos [Canto 81], though written in classical hexameters, strives to rewrite itself in blank tetrameter.) Crane often used a loose pentameter, however, to flail himself as far away from the syntax and diction of common speech as he could get and not have comprehension crumble entirely beneath him.
At that time, probably few would have called Crane’s poetry “experimental.” By the late fifties or early sixties (after the 1958 reprinting of his poems), Crane seemed a vivid, intense lyricist, whose poems, a little more frequently than was comfortable, lapsed over into the incomprehensible. Gertrude Stein’s considerable effect was felt almost entirely within the realm of prose. Pound and Eliot were still the models for poetic experimentation among the young. And one suspected that any experiment whose rhetorical model could not be found within them was an experiment that had failed — by definition.
Once Eliot first published them in 1917’s “Prufrock,” for the next fifty years couplets like
and
astonished young writers again and again with their LaForguian bathos. Like many poets of the twenties, Crane had followed Eliot back to LaForgue; he’d early-on translated “Three Locutions Des Pierots” from LaForgue’s French.
One of the first poems where Crane thought about responding to Eliot — one of the first to which he committed the whole of his poetic abilities and in which he first began to create lines that regularly arrived at the a-referential form we now think of as characteristic of him — was “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” But if this poem sounds like anything to the modern ear, it sounds more like a pastiche of Eliot’s “Prufrock” than a critique of it.
and
must recall to the sensitive reader Eliot’s near-signature feminine rhymes:
and
As well, Crane’s generalized apostrophes —
recall not only the apostrophe above it but recall equally Prufrock’s general claims to knowledge:
Further comparison of the two poems, however, reveals a far greater metric regularity in Crane’s verse than in Eliot’s (or, if you prefer, a greater metrical variety in Eliot’s verse than in Crane’s): Eliot often pairs tetrameters with hexameters, now in trochaics, now in iambics (which the ear then tries to re-render into more traditional paired pentameters), where Crane generally relies on blank or rhymed couplets.
With a full seventy years, however, Eliot’s variety has finally been normalized and absorbed into the general range of free verse — so that it is almost hard to see his variation today as formal. As Eliot’s idiosyncrasies have become one with the baseline of American poetic diction, Crane the occasionally-over-the-top lyricist has metamorphosed into Crane the rhetorical revolutionary.
The study of eccentric figures on the poetic landscape tends to blind us, with the passage of time, to the mainstream that made the eccentric signify as it did. What was the scope of mainstream poetry during the twenties — Crane’s decade?
In 1921 Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Collected Poems, with the award of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, made the fifty-year-old poet, till then all but unknown — though he had been publishing books of verse since the 1880s — into a famous man. Eliot’s Waste Land (along with Joyce’s Ulysses) appeared in 1922, but it was a success de scandal, not a popular triumph: the talk alone of people who talked of poetry. But then, that same year, so was Amy Lowell’s A Critical Fable — a humorous survey of the poetic scene since the War, whose title was taken from her forebear, James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848), both with their tour de force introductions in rhymed prose. (That same November in Paris Marcel Proust died, leaving unpublished the last three sections of his great novel.) 1923 saw Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems receive the Pulitzer. 1924 saw it go to Robert Frost for his second book- length collection, New Hampshire. That same year, Robinson Jeffers’s Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems was an extraordinary popular success with the reading public — setting off a controversy over Jeffers’s poetic merit that has not abated. In France that year, a poem touching on many of the same political concerns as Crane’s The Bridge appeared, a poem which makes an informative contrast with it: St.-John Perse’s Anabase. (Perse’s Amitie du Prince appeared the same year.) And in America in ’24, Wallace Stevens wrote what was to become one of his most famous poems, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—before entering half a dozen years of comparative poetic inactivity. And in 1925 twelve-year-old poet Nathalia Crane’s The Janitor’s Boy appeared, with introductory statements by both William Rose Benét (citing other poetic prodigies of merit, including the Scottish Marjorie Flemming, Hilda Conkling, and Scottish- born Helen Douglas Adam) and Nunnally Johnson — and went through a dozen-plus printings in no time. Robinson’s next book, The Man Who Died Twice (1925), won him another Pulitzer; the 1926 Pulitzer went, posthumously, to Amy Lowell for What’s O’Clock (published the same year — also posthumously — as her two-volume biography, John Keats). And the following year Robinson received his third Pulitzer for his book- length poem Tristram (1927) — which became a bona fide best seller. Poetry best sellers were certainly not common in those years, but they were more common than in ours. In the same year, Millay’s verse drama, on which Deems Taylor based his successful opera of the same title, The King’s Henchman, went through twelve printings between February and September (while in Germany, also in 1927, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time appeared, a work whose enterprise can be read as the cornerstone of his earliest attempts to poeticize the contemporary world, against a rigorous critique of metaphysics). That year American scholar John Livingston Lowe first published his exhaustive and illuminating findings from his researches into the early readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. In 1928, Stephen Vincent Benét’s novel in verse, John Brown’s Body, captivated the general reading public. And through it all, the various volumes of Millay, for critics like Edmund Wilson, marked the true height of American poetic achievement.