What characterizes this range of American poetry is its extraordinary referential and argumentative clarity (argument used here in terms both of narrative and of logic) — often to the detriment of all musicality (as well as rhetorical ornamentation) not completely controlled by the regularity of meter and end-rhyme.
This was the mainstream of American poetry Eliot, Pound, H. D., and William Carlos Williams — as well as Crane (and Lowell, while she was alive) — saw themselves, one way or the other, at odds with. And this is the context that explains Loveman’s seemingly gratuitous swipe at Mrs. Browning. First, the simple sexism that it represents is certainly at work in the comment — as it was against Amy Lowell, who worked as hard as any poet to ally her work and her enthusiasms with the new. To deny it would be as absurd as denying the homophobia Yingling found at work in the structure of the reputation of Crane. But, we must also remember, as a traditional poet, Elizabeth Browning was popular, even in the twenties. She was accessible. Thus she was seen to be on the side of referential clarity that those associated with the avant-garde felt called upon to denigrate. But, as is the case with the homophobia directed toward Crane, we must remember that it works not to obliterate the reputation, but rather to hold the reputation at a particular point — which was and is, finally, higher than that of many male poets of the time.
Today, it’s the Language Poets whose works wrench Crane out of his position as a lyricist-too-extreme and forces us to reread him as a rhetorical revolutionary. Precisely what has been marginalized in the early readings of Crane — or, at any rate, pointed at with wagging finger as indicative of some essential failure — is now brought to the critical center and made the positive node of attention.
For what is now made the center of our rhetorical concern with Crane is precisely that “verbiage” Loveman would have stripped from the work — those moments where referentiality fails and language is loosed to work on us in its most immediate materiality.
Again and again through Crane’s most varied, most exciting poems, phrases and sentences begin which promise to lead us to some referen- tially satisfying conclusion, through the form of some poetic figure. And again and again what Crane presents us with to conclude those figures is simply a word — a word that resists any and all save the most catachrestic of referential interpretations, so that readers are left with nothing to contemplate save what language poet Ron Silliman has called the pure “materiality of the signifier.” It is easy to see (and to say) that Crane’s poetry foregrounds language, making readers revel in its sensuousness and richness. But one of the rhetorical strategies by which he accomplishes this in line after line is simply to shut down the semantic, referential instrumentality of language all but completely:
Or:
The final words — “spawn,” “fire and snow”—arrive in swirling atmospheres of connotation, to which they even contribute; but reference plays little part in the resolution of these poetic figures. Reading only begins with such lines as one turns to clarify how they resist reference, resist interpretation, even as their syntax seems to court them. But to find examples we can look in any of Crane’s mature work.
In 1963—the same year I was having the conversation about T. S. Eliot with the aforementioned poet — in France Michel Foucault was writing, in an essay on contemporary fiction, that the problem was not that “language is a certain distance from things. Language is the distance.”
Thirty years before, Crane’s suicide had put an end to a body of work that — not till twice thirty years later — would be generally acknowledged as among the earlier texts to inhabit that distance directly and, in so inhabiting it, shift an entire current of poetic sensibility in a new direction.
We like to tell tales of how confident our heroes are in their revolutionary pursuits. But it is more honest, in Crane’s case at any rate, to talk about how paralyzingly unsure he was — at least at times — about precisely this aspect of his work; though, frankly, in the twenties, how could he have felt otherwise?
In a 1963 interview, Loveman recounted:
Once — I don’t know whether I ever told you — he tried to commit suicide in my presence.
We had been out having dinner; he got raffishly high and we went to a lovely restaurant in the Village. No one was there but Didley Digges, the actor, in one corner. Hart waltzed me over to him with a low bow. Then he began to dance mazurkas on the floor. He loved to dance. It was a big room, and we had an excellent dinner. He got a little higher, and when he went out, as usual, he bargained with a taxi driver. He would never pay more than two dollars fare to Brooklyn. And then, usually, because he always forgot that he hadn’t money with him, the person with him had to pay it. Through some mishap, we landed at the Williamsburg Bridge. I think there is a monument or a column there and Hart went up and as a matter of rite or sacrilege pissed against it. Then we started across to Columbia Heights. He lived at Number 110. When we got to Henry Street, it was around eleven or eleven-thirty. In one of the doorways we saw four legs sticking out and a sign, “We are not bums.” They were going to an early market and their wagon was parked in the street. Hart became hysterical with laughter. Well, when we got to Columbia Heights, the mood changed. The entire situation changed. He broke away from me and ran straight up the three flights of stairs, then up the ladder to the roof, and I followed him. I was capable of doing that then. As he got to the top, he threw himself over the roof and I grabbed his leg, one leg, and, oh, I was scared to death. And I said, “You son of a bitch! Don’t you every try that on me again.” So he picked himself up and said, “I might as well, I’m only writing rhetoric.”