Finally, only the young poet is spared by the Voice, as one who has sought after truth. The day dawns; what remains of the city is only the good and the pure — which, indeed, isn’t very much. The poet regains his boat and returns from whence he came over the blue waters and under the brilliant sun.
The city to which the poet in his boat returns in the evening is, however, sordid and lurid. (In the two stanzas describing it — II and III of Part IV, “The Return”—we have the first intimations of what Thomson will publish eighteen years on, in the more powerful, but less Atlantian, City of Dreadful Night.) So once more the poet takes to his boat and returns to the ruined site of the mythic City, to hear the voice again deliver a jeremiad against the greed and evil of urban corruption.
With this sermon threatening the fall of the real city, The Doom of a City ends.
The question is: did Crane at some point encounter the two volumes of The Poetical Works of James Thomson, edited and published after Thomson’s death by Bertram Dobell in 1895—where, indeed, he might have found The Doom of a City? As we have said, Crane’s “Proem” at the start of The Bridge makes it almost certain that he knew The City of Dreadful Night. But would his curiosity have drawn him to pursue Thomson back to this Ur-version of that paean to urban psychic disaster — Thomson’s own, twenty-three-year-old’s retelling of the destruction of Atlantis?
Periodically, starting with his death, there were attempts to establish Thomson as an important canonical poet. But everything from Thomson’s militant atheism and radical politics to his dipsomania and dreadfully sordid final years militated against it — especially during the first-wave attempt, spearheaded by Dobell, in the 1880s and ’90s. (That both Poe and Thomson, in the manner of Novalis before them, were associated with tragic affairs with much younger women is not, as it works toward the moral marginalization of both, without its meaning.) Thomson is a poet a full understanding of whose work hinges not only on Novalis (and Shelley), but also on Heine and Leopardi: he translated significant amounts of both. (Indeed, Thomson’s literary tastes were quite advanced: he championed Whitman, Emerson, and William Blake when all three were majorly controversial figures in England.) But two World Wars, with Germany as the villain (and Italy not far behind), has made English writers with leanings in those national directions less sympathetic to us than they might otherwise be.
Crane’s essay “The Case Against Nietzsche” (1918) was his own attempt to fight that particular sort of jingoism, which, after the Great War, often seemed a tidal wave of pure anti-intellectualism. But certainly Thomson, with his secret sorrow and tragic life, could have been a poet that Crane in his later years, drinking himself into a poetic silence, as did Thomson, might well have sympathized, if not identified, with.
The brilliant moonlit evocations of the City that litter Thomson’s earlier poem all through its second quarter certainly put one in mind of the moonlight flooded structure that is the vision behind Crane’s “Atlantis”—the terminal section of his own major poetic series — as if all that was needed between Thomson’s vision of London and the moon-drenched vision of his own Atlantis was, somehow, a bridge…
An early Encyclopedia Britannica article on Thomson that Crane might well have read — I first looked him up the same year I first read Crane, in 1958, the same year I came across a powerful fragment from The City of Dreadful Night in an old Oscar Williams paperback anthology (“As I came through the desert, thus it was / As I came through the desert…”) — while generally praising Thomson, closes by chiding him for “the not infrequent use of mere rhetoric and verbiage,” terms we have already heard in our pursuit of Crane.
But even if there was no direct influence (though there may well be an intentional dialogue), certainly there’s no harm in holding the young Thomson’s moonlit Atlantis up to provide the missing city for Crane’s.
V
Like Brom Weber’s before it, Marc Simon’s more recent edition of The Poems of Hart Crane (1986) (with an Introduction by John Unterecker, author of the National Book Award — winning Crane biography, Voyager [1969]), is designated by the editor a “reader’s edition.” (Weber promised a variorum edition, but it has yet to appear.) Simon expands the corpus of Weber’s 1966 edition, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, by a hefty handful of fragments and incomplete poems, as well as more early and uncollected poems. Simon’s omission of the word “Complete” quietly suggests there may even be other poems to come — possibly some of currently dubious attribution.
(In 1993 the Simon volume was reissued as Complete Poems of Hart Crane.)
Weber’s ’66 edition had replaced the hasty 1933 edition, The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, that Waldo Frank had put together (reprinted in 1958 as Complete Poems), which contained Crane’s only two published books, White Buildings and The Bridge, along with a projected third volume, unpublished at Crane’s death, Key West: An Island Sheaf. The current Simon volume is longer than the Frank by more than sixty poems. The problem, however, is that the general poetry reader today is a very different person from the general poetry reader of circa World War I, when the academization of literature began to divide significant writers’ works into specialist and non-specialist editions — the non-specialist edition free of extensive notes and usually printed fairly inexpensively. But — today — the reader who is wholly unconcerned with biography, devoid of interest in, or even knowledge of, the times in which Crane wrote, and who aims to get all her or his pleasure only from an encounter with the bare and unadorned text, is simply an artificial construct.
Certainly one would like to see The Bridge accorded the textual treatment, with variants and alternate versions and the careful redaction of manuscript and galley markings, that has already been lavished on Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ginsberg’s Howl. But though such an edition is devoutly to be wished, what is needed is a readers’ edition with notes that will allow people who want to read Crane’s poems to pursue the ordinary interests that today’s actual readers of poems have.
We need an edition with notes that will tell us that “Voyages I” was first written and published as a separate poem, called variously “Poster” and “The Bottom of the Sea is Cruel.” (Critics regularly discuss it under both titles.) We need notes that will tell us that “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen II” was first written as a separate poem, “The Springs of Guilty Song.” We need notes that will tell us that when “Recitative” was first written in 1923 it was three stanzas shorter than the final 1926 revision — and which three stanzas were added! We need a note to tell us that “Thou Canst Read Nothing Except Through Appetite…” was a poem Crane typed on the back of a piece of paper bearing a name and address someone had passed him in a heavy cruising venue (the baths? the bridge? the docks?), and that, in order to indicate its nature, long-time friend and confidant, Samuel Loveman, who did the actual textual editing on the poems for Weber’s ’66 edition, gave it the title “Reply,” which is clearly what it is, even if the title isn’t Crane’s. We need notes that will tell us that Crane sent the fragment, “This Way Where November…” in a November 1923 letter to Jean Toomer, in which he described it as part of a long poem to be titled “White Buildings,” centering on a catastrophic sexual encounter with a sailor that began at a drunken gathering of friends the night before Crane was to leave to spend the remainder of winter ’23 in Woodstock, New York — and that Crane predicted the poem, when complete, would be unprintable; but that only this fragment survives.