The Poet in America
Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study.
by Brom Weber.
New York, The Bodley Press, 1948. 424 pp. $4.50.

The best reason for being interested in Hart Crane is that he was a superb lyric poet, one of the most gifted America has produced. But he can also be studied for another reason. Crane supersedes all earlier figures as the most painful symbol of the tragedy of the artist in America. The period of the 20’s simultaneously stimulated and stifled American culture to an exceptional degree, and the higher the potential achievement, the more menacing the environment proved to be. This is well understood in the case of those poets of the period who attempted to save themselves by exile; it is easier to see Crane’s as simply a morbid personal tragedy, without reckoning how much the period contributed to his brief exaltations, confusion, and final total estrangement.

One can readily agree that the personality which flowered out of Crane’s childhood might have had a fatal ending in any period. But the forces in our society which were most inimical to him—among them the familiar brutal commercialism and also the rootless religiosity—were those which worked on him grossly from his first beg innings. The point about Crane in relation to his time is that he was impelled to destroy him self before he was burned out as a writer; he was still a great poet a few weeks before his suicide, when he completed “The Broken Tower.” From this viewpoint, the figures who offer the most illuminating comparisons with Crane are not his contemporaries, but two other poètes maudits: Poe and Rimbaud.

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Crane’s American “ancestor,” despite the pathos of his life, and despite also the comparative inferiority of his talent as a poet, had a “career”; in his time it was still less difficult than in ours for a poet to exist, however grimly, as a man of letters. The fact that Poe’s career was socially possible has aesthetic importance: it made possible a relatively rounded and complete literary work. The 20’s denied Crane even this, and his inability to grub a living is less important than his sense of total estrangement from the dominant culture of New York.

The extremity of this estrangement becomes clearer when one compares Crane’s life and work with Rimbaud’s. The parallel between them goes far beyond the American’s conscious intention: “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” stands at the same point in his work as “Le Bateau Ivre” does in Rimbaud’s—but it is significantly weaker in coherence and structure at the same time that it is more ambitious. Crane’s “Voyages,” in which Eros goes on his hallucinated passage to a sea-burial, occupy, together with some companion pieces, a place comparable to the Illuminations. But there—at the point where Rimbaud pushed on to sum up his experience in a masterpiece—the parallel breaks off. In The Bridge, Crane attempted to express the opposite of what he had come to believe, and his epic collapsed in rhetoric. He never emerged intact from his season in hell, and it was left for Eliot to write the nearest English equivalent to Rimbaud’s great poem.

Such a comparison can hardly be pushed even so far without distortion; neither periods nor personalities are interchangeable. But it is not wholly a matter of personality that, out of the defeated and humiliated France in which he grew up, as well as out of his own repudiation of his culture, his society, and his normal identity, Rimbaud was able to gather a masterpiece. But when Crane came to the height of his powers in an America that was extravagantly successful, extravagantly rich, extravagantly “free,” he lost faith in his own desire to celebrate it—by which time he was also too demoralized to reject it. It was not wholly the poet’s failure; the commercialization of values in the 20’s had made even a poetry of revolt difficult, and Crane was not equipped for the effort of total rejection.

Remembering this fact, and savoring the irony of Karl Shapiro’s description of Crane as “the poet of our industrial success,” one can see a certain gross propriety in Mr. Weber’s book. Crane’s poetic history ran the length of that other Boom (he jumped into the sea at the depth of the depression). The same commercialization of values which helped to confuse and dismay Crane is currently at work again, and its infection has helped author and publisher to inflate what should have been a modest study of some of Crane’s published and hitherto unpublished pieces into a bulky and slovenly book that shows no respect whatever for the standards of that small audience that is likely to read any book about Crane.

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Weber’s Crane is a crude first draft, heavily padded, but apparently neither revised for publication nor adequately proof-read. Its pages are rich with misprints, misused words, and sentences devoid of syntax. (One reads of the “recondition” of Ezra Pound, for “reconditeness,” and of the “obliquity” of modem poets, which is an interesting point, but out of key with its context.) The whole is written in a style of mixed-up clichés and sloppy circumlocution—bookpage journalese in which Crane’s image, when it emerges as more than a blur, is parodied. (Talking of Crane’s homosexuality, Mr. Weber undertakes to list some of his “feminine aspects” for us: “he was generous and sympathetic, fond of children, fastidious in his grooming and devoted to cleanliness. . . .”)

Ten years ago, Philip Horton published his Hart Crane: the Life of an American Poet. Re-reading it today, one confirms the impression that Horton had met admirably the specifications of his subtitle: he has given us not only the figure of Crane, but Crane in the context of his period. Weber’s “biographical” passages, with their lopsided emphasis on Crane’s collapses and hysterias, add nothing to Horton’s portrait. His critical contribution is better, but incomplete and wordy.

The difficulties Crane’s poems present are rarely those of the central “thought.” They sometimes come from the ambiguity—rather than the complexity—of his organization; most often from the expression of a unique sensibility through an extreme reach of allusion and metaphor. So far as it can be done, Crane’s obscurities, which are sometimes wholly private or partly incoherent, must be adumbrated line by line. Mr. Weber attempts this with certain passages in Crane’s more important poems, but does not carry through with any of them. Elsewhere, he offers synopses and appreciations.

However, one cannot read any book about Crane, even an unsatisfactory one, without a more poignant awareness of the cost which his society (in part) exacted from Crane for his achievements, and how much it limited them. And the 20’s are merely one extreme example of what can happen in a democratic society whose values, proposed for celebration in art, are so drastically re-evaluated in the market.

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