Faint Taste for Hart Crane

Did you notice that William Logan, poetry critic of the New Criterion and occasional poetry reviewer for the New York Times, came out with a defense of his challenge to the value of Hart Crane’s poetry? I discussed the challenge briefly on this blog a good while back, mostly because of its important bearing on the study of Yvor Winters. (The short piece came out in Poetry last month, and you can find it easily with a search engine.) Apparently, perhaps inevitably, Logan got a truckload of irate mail concerning that review he wrote in the Times about a year ago about the Library of America’s new edition of Crane’s poetry and letters. In that earlier piece, Logan took a couple genial swipes (rather correctly placed swipes, in my view) at the merits of most of Crane’s work.

Logan doesn’t exactly back down in the new piece in Poetry. He calls a good deal of Crane “gassy” and bashes a few lines as “embarrassing,” with the implication that a lot of Crane is just as, if not more, inept. But he doesn’t quite give what I would call a vigorous rational defense of his views, either. In fact, I found the new piece rather disappointing. I was looking forward to Logan’s lacing up the gloves and throwing a few good punches in the form of some sound reasons for his judgments concerning Crane. But in the Poetry article he no more than briefly repeats a few of his opinions concerning Crane’s style but then, quite feebly, defends those views on grounds of the infinite variability in literary taste. I must says that I find Logan’s stand on the relativism of judgment (to be facetious) rather distasteful:

You can't stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can't stand that whiner Keats, I can't stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley -— poets are Rorschach tests.

This from a poet and critic as erudite and as sure of himself as William Logan? I find such comments rather alarming. I could hardly credit that I read them. Come on, Bill. Give us reasons. I agree with you on Hart Crane. I think he is far overrated. He IS full of gas. But enlighten us with some of your good reasons why you think he is.

Yet even Logan belies this limp defense. For at the end of the Poetry piece, he faintly, very faintly, implies that there is something more at stake in seeing Hart Crane’s work for what it is than a matter of relative taste:

If the critic were meant to offer solace, he would have taken up a different line of work. All he can do is record his feelings for the one or two readers willing to look again at Crane -- the critic's job is not to pat the reader on the head and whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

But why bother with trying to get anyone to “look at” Crane again if taste is wholly relative? There is no reason to look again if taste by this definition is all that counts and if one taste is as good as another. But Logan seems to want to say that something important is at stake in recording “his feelings.” It seems that he thinks that there is something important to readers looking at Crane again, whatever that might mean exactly and concretely. Tell us what it is, Bill.

Evaluate Yvor Winter’s judgments and tastes as you will, but he certainly took pains to give reasons in defense of his views -- and he gave them sometimes quite forcefully. (Nonetheless, as I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog, more often than people realize Winters didn’t bother defending himself against many of his attackers.) Winters was out to change tastes and more. Something big was at stake. Winters fought his position in the belief that we readers of the modern age NEED to develop, first, a taste for a new brand of classicism so that a few and ever more poets would away from the damaging practices fostered by Romanticism.

What William Logan claims is that it comes down to style concerning Hart Crane: “If there's a negative case for Crane, it lies in all that waxy rhetoric, glossy on the outside and rotten within.” But Yvor Winters, as a classicist, thought Crane’s weaknesses laid in much more than his decidedly breathlessly bombastic rhetoric. Here is a taste of Winters’s sharp comments on Crane from Primitivism and Decadence, as reprinted in In Defense of Reason:

... the fragmentary, ejaculatory, and overexcited quality of a great many of the poems of Hart Crane is inseparable from the intellectual confusion upon which these particular poems seem to rest (for examples, The Dance, Cape Hatteras, and Atlantis). Crane possessed great energy, but his faculties functioned clearly only within a limited range of experience (Repose of Rivers, Voyages II, Faustus and Helen II). Outside of that range he was either numb (My Grandmother's Love-letters and Harbor Dawn) or unsure of himself and hence uncertain in his detail (as in The River, a very powerful poem in spite of its poor construction and its quantities of bad writing) or both (see Indiana, probably one of the worst poems in modern literature).

Well, I suppose I must admit that these particular reasons are not much fuller (and no sharper) than Logan’s in his two recent pieces. But in the context of Winters’s study of modern American poetry in Primitivism and Decadence, his assessment of Crane gives us much deeper insight into Crane’s weaknesses than William Logan has so far given us. The blatant, resigned relativism of Logan’s latest effort in Poetry helps little to clarify his views or further debate on Hart Crane or any other critical issue he has fulminated upon. For such ideas actually thwart debate -- by laying the whole of all such matters at the feet of the infinitely variable, ever-changing gods of mere taste. Despite this setback, I am still hoping for a lot more from William Logan.

Hart Crane Draws Out William Logan

The essays continue to sprinkle down upon us concerning the boozy, brassy, bombastic American poet Hart Crane, one-time friend of Yvor Winters before he committed suicide, and that new edition of Crane’s poems and letters that the Library of America published late last year. The New York Times has worked its way around to offering a review of the LofA edition, a review written by the redoubtable William Logan, a poet who has been a poetry columnist for the New Criterion, which I rate as perhaps the single best general journal that defends and publishes formalist poetry -- or, as I should say, publishes some “poetry” rather than nothing other than free-verse prosetic musings that, amazingly (at least to me), continue to pass for poetry among the educated denizens our long-confused literary culture. (I should clarify, though, by stating that the New Criterion does put out its share of rambling free verse prosetry besides its editors’ publication of some relatively strong work in traditional forms.)

William Logan writes entertaining occasional pieces for the New Criterion, called verse chronicles, in which he reviews five or six books of poetry at once, a practice in poetry reviews that gives readers a feel for how poetry is generally written nowadays. He’s a tough bird. He has strong opinions; trades liberally in witty, elegant, and sometimes nasty put-downs; and doesn’t think much of much in the world of American poetry. He doesn’t suffer fools, pretensions, or what he considers bad writing well -- and he appears to think that bad writing is the norm. His piece on the new edition of Hart Crane, revealingly entitled “Hart Crane’s Bridge to Nowhere” was published more than a month ago and can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Logan.t.html?ei=5070&en=5013e52c6cf8f1f0&ex=1173931200&pagewanted=all

Logan takes a half dozen sidelong whacks with his critic’s two-by-four at Crane’s standing as one of America’s finest modern poets, and even as a good writer, but it’s probably hopeless that Crane will fall. Crane has been embalmed and put on display for decades to come in his tomb on America’s literary Red Square. It will take more than a few cleverly snide, undefended adjectives for Crane’s body to be laid to rest in the dark dirt. In contrast to Logan’s whacks, you can easily find profuse praises sung to Hart Crane all across the web.

Let me just say that Crane does almost nothing for me, despite Yvor Winters’s unstintingly high esteem for his poetic style -- alleged by Winters to be no less than Shakespearean. John Fraser chose three of Crane’s poems for his New Book of Verse, all three of which were rather loftily praised by Winters (though he never said without qualification that they are great). I consider Crane’s inclusion in the Winters Canon to be unjustified, though not insupportable, but for now I can only promise that I will get to my case that his work is less than great some day soon. For his part, Logan offers no justification for his mostly disapproving take on Crane -- though that’s not surprising. For Logan is accomplished at delivering sidelong whacks that he doesn’t bother taking the time to justify. He’s a reviewer, after all. Yet I haven’t found Logan’s case for a lesser status for Crane in his other writings, either. He writes criticism like Winters in this way, too often willing to throw out a strong, definitive, seemingly irrevocable opinion for which no rationale whatsoever will ever be offered. As Winters also often seems to have thought, Logan appears to think that if you don’t see the obvious validity of his hard-biting, rapid-fire opinions, then there’s no use making a case for them. Winters practiced that method, to my repeated frustration, much too often, I would say.

Logan’s judgment of “The Bridge,” which I find sensible, differs not a lot from Yvor Winters’s:

Much of “The Bridge” seems inert now -- overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a Myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney. Crane imagined the Brooklyn Bridge as a mystical symbol for art, for history, for America, for any old thing; in this spiritual version of Manifest Destiny, he threw his poem backward to Columbus and worked forward to the invention of the airplane. The canvas was broad, but its success would have required a language less Alexandrian than Crane possessed.

Though a little more loosely written, and quite a bit cockier -- with a touch of a sneer in there too -- the substance of Logan’s assessment is strikingly similar to Winters’s, as delivered first in that oft-mentioned though seldom quoted (or studied) review, “The Progress of Hart Crane,” which was first published in 1930 in Poetry (it has been reprinted in The Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Yvor Winters, which is available in most university libraries and used book web sites):

And the “destiny” of a nation is hard to get at in the abstract, since it is a vague generality, like “the French temperament” or “the average American.” It reduces itself, when one comes to describe it... to the most elementary and the least interesting aspects of the general landscape, aspects which cannot possibly be imbued with any definite significance, no matter how excited one may get, for the simple reason that no definite significance is available. It is on this rock that “Atlantis” [one of the poems of “The Bridge”] shatters; and on a similar rock... occurs the wreck of “The Dance,” the other climax of the volume.

Despite Winters’s renown for being villainously harsh, you could say that this passage comes off as quite a bit less mordant than William Logan’s undefended summary of his take on “The Bridge,” however much either man be right or wrong about the series. Winters clearly, at the least, took Crane’s purposes very seriously, which Logan sounds as though he does not. For my part, I agree with Logan. I think Crane’s whole project, somewhat like James Joyce’s nutty endeavor to subsume the entire mythic history of the West into the story of one day in the life of a dreary Dublin man named Leopold Bloom, to be not a little silly. Even if it made perfectly good sense, even if it were blazingly well written, I would still find Crane’s “Bridge” to be mostly pointless posturing. I see little more than pretension in such woolly, grandiose cultural visions -- Joyce’s included, if I dare to take that long step off the cliff into literary heresy.

Some time, I must go through Winters’s review to study it from the perspective of a Wintersian, since it’s most often mentioned to disparage Winters by those who disagree with just about every central idea he propounded. Strange to say, the review has received little sustained attention from those who have sympathies with or have study Winters closely. Once again, I find Winters to be right in just about everything he says about Crane and “The Bridge,” except for the extravagant praise for Crane’s style. But the cocktail of praise and censure Winters served up in that 1930 review was a drink Crane couldn’t stomach, quite understandably. Here is one short passage that I think best sums up the tone of the whole piece:

It is obvious from such a stanza that we are analyzing the flaws in a genius of a high order -- none of the famous purple patches in Shelley, for example, surpasses this stanza [from “The Dance”] and probably none equals it; so be it. But the flaws in Mr. Crane’s genius are, I believe, so great as to partake, if they persist, almost of the nature of a public catastrophe.

You can hardly blame Crane for blanching with anger at censure as extravagant as the praise. Can Crane’s poetry be this direly dangerous? That’s another matter I’ve to get back to, as I’ve mentioned in other posts already. (So much to discuss: when will I get to it all?)

William Logan, I should add in closing, most often writes what I consider prosetry, work which is sometimes published in the New Criterion. His musings are dense, verbally sparkling, syntactically difficult, but thematically loose and rambling. His work is constructed on the associative method: one thought causes another to pop into the conscious and thence onto the page. His poems offer little rational insight into important human experiences, in my opinion. I seldom remember one of his poems five minutes after reading it a couple times. (Well, there you find me doing it: tossing out opinions for which I have no intention just now of making a case. I guess critics are all guilty of the practice.)

I don’t claim to be able to write good poetry, either. I’m just telling you what I have found, as a Wintersian. Logan is worth reading as an entertaining and occasionally insightful poetry critic (though there is no hint that he’s Wintersian), but not much as a poet, at least so far. Though I’m not offering a full, open endorsement of his criticism, so few have been the poetry critics worth reading in recent years that I will recommend Logan and his New York Times review of Hart Crane’s poetry and life. He appears to know good rhetorical style, if not truly superior poetry. Perhaps I shall I find time and consider it important enough some day soon to go through some of his hundreds of opinions and judgments and offer my assessment of his critical bent. You can find some of his verse chronicles on line by searching on his name at the New Criterion web site. But I think I will have to consider Hart Crane’s work and Winters’s evaluation of it more closely before I ever get to William Logan.

Winters in the Times

Another mention of Yvor Winters has occurred in a major publication. This time it came in the New York Times, which published an essay on the poetryfoundation.org controversy that has been roiling lately in literary magazines and on web sites around the country. It’s a sharp little essay on the criticism the Poetry Foundation received from the poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine, Dana Goodyear, who last month ran a long, scathing piece about the foundation’s use of that $200 million bequest that make such a huge splash in the news a couple years ago -- the only time in recent memory that poetry has made a huge splash for any reason in the general news, a splash which, of course, befits America, since the splash was actually created by the chunk of moola involved, not the poetry. This mild controversy, along with the New Yorker essay, are matters I have wanted to comment on, but other subjects have pushed them back in my queue. The NYT essay, by the engaging David Orr, the NYT Book Review’s poetry columnist, can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/books/review/Orr.t.html?8bu&emc=bu

The mention of Winters, brief as it is, concerns Winters’s mostly disapproving and allegedly callous review of Hart Crane’s renowned “epic” series of poems “The Bridge,” a review which badly damaged their literary friendship. I have discussed Crane and Winters several times already in the opening months of this blog, on the occasion of the release of a new biography of Crane. I find it interesting that Orr appears to believe that readers of essays about poetry in the Times will understand at least this one aspect of Winters’s career. I wonder whether many do. But perhaps just enough people know him for one incident, that review of Hart Crane, that Orr can trust the reference is not yet obscure. I find that a good sign. At least Winters’s name is still known, however marginally. There is yet hope that he might be read by those who know the name and know of the relationship with Crane.

By the way, Orr published a review of one of the latest editions of Winters’s Selected Poems, the one edited by the late poet Thom Gunn that came out just a few years ago. I’ve been meaning to discuss that review, since it came from a leading figure in the world of American poetry. I will get to it in time, though it’s already a few years old.

Winters Changed a Life... But How?

I stumbled across one of the very few references to Yvor Winters in a popular literary book of any sort the other night. I’ve been casually breezing through a little book of interviews with a dozen or so poets and novelists entitled The Book That Changed My Life (published in 2002). I enjoy books about the books others have found monumentally important in their lives. Just as I made many discoveries of great writing through reading Yvor Winters some 30 years ago, so I have kept on searching books about life-changing books in the hope of making similar discoveries from unexpected sources. Believe me, I have made many discoveries over the years in this way. Need an example? I’ll give you just one among many from my life: the novels of Brian Moore and specifically his very fine novel of the Jesuit Huron mission in 17th-century Nouveau Francais Black Robe, which was adapted into a pretty strong film as well. The making of discoveries is something I hope my readers and those at least marginally interested in Yvor Winters will want to discuss on this blog over time.

But the much larger issue of literary discoveries is beside my purpose at the moment. What I want to write about is Yvor Winters getting mentioned in one of these books. The rare event happened because one of the people chosen for an interview about the books that changed his or her life was Philip Levine, a prominent poet who once studied in Yvor Winters’s graduate program at Stanford in the late 1950s. Now before you start making assumptions, let me be clear that I did not pick up the book because Levine or any former Winters student had been interviewed for it. It was by pure chance that I discovered the reference to Winters.

But yes, it was Levine who put Winters’s In Defense of Reason in his list of about 20 books that changed his life (the longest list in the book). In his short interview, Levine didn’t discuss Winters or even mention him. But I know a few things about Levine, whom I would not classify as a Wintersian in any sense of the term. I have read his account of his studies with Winters in his memoir The Bread of Time. He has gone on to one of the most successful (in terms of getting hired, paid, and published) and highly praised careers in American poetry. I have read dozens of his poems and have followed his poetry for years in the New Yorker, in which he is published regularly. I can discern no influence of Winters in anything the man has ever written, not a single poem, line, idea, or word. It’s hardly a surprise that Levine can write competent prose, since that’s all he really ever writes. His “poetry” is actually, in my view of the matter, pedestrian prose broken up into lines. I have never been moved by one of his broken-up “prosems”. I have never much enjoyed or profited in some significant way from one of his musings.

His memoir, which includes a chapter on Winters, gives off a bracing self-assurance that reminds me of Winters in some ways. Reading him gives you the immediate impression that Levine knows a lot about what he chooses to talk about and believes he is nearly fully right about anything he takes the time to offer an opinion or judgment about. But I don’t agree with Philip Levine on much of anything concerning poetry or literature. Yvor Winters changed my life, too, and In Defense of Reason played a large role in that change. But I can’t guess how that book changed Philip Levine’s life. It had no discernible affect on his “poetry”. Levine, in my appraisal, as I say, doesn’t really write poetry. He is rather one of the most dogged prosetic musers of our time, putting out book after book of flat, plain, jumbled prose on the mundane events of his life. I have read that he claims to be seeking a very subtle rhythm through this prosetry, by breaking up his mediocre, meandering sentences into lines, often lines of six to ten syllables. But I see this sort of writing as bland, loose, unstructured prose crumbled into lines for no discernible purpose but to look like actual poetry, which is metrical composition. (To clarify: the procedure certainly could have a purpose in Levine’s mind, but I don’t think that purpose is discernible by anyone outside that mind.) The study of a poet like Levine can often cause a bit of literary vertigo, since he stands before you in his writings with an aura of enormous confidence in his work, but it’s a self-assurance he has little warrant for, since his “poetry” lies almost dead on the page -- there’s almost nothing to it that a discerning reader of rational, metrical composition would appreciate or value. Levine’s musings have had little worth to me, even though I can see as well as anyone that he can turn a pleasant phrase of prose description from time to time -- and even though he carries himself in a stern, square-jawed manner through which he tells us that thinks he knows fully well what he’s doing, that he’s writing very, very good poetry.

Changing the subject, Levine had some interesting comments about one of our current and highest national saints of poetry Walt Whitman (sarcasm intended) in his interview that would have dismayed Yvor Winters and stopped him cold in fear for literature:

“Song of Myself” pushes in a variety of directions, but the vision that moved me most was, “I am you. We are one creation.” I believed it even before I read it. And also, “There is that lot of me and all so luscious.” The bravery of such a line, the claim: I am unique but I am unique in the way that you are also unique, because each of us is a little cosmos and one is as good as another. I was just thunderstruck by that notion, because one is constantly being told, You’re ordinary. And Whitman is saying, Yes, you are ordinary, because the ordinary is the storehouse of the extraordinary; the only place you’re ever going to encounter the extraordinary is going to be in the ordinary, in the daily. And the frank embrace of the sensual and the self; what a rewarding way to see ourselves.

Little of Winters seems to have seeped through on the subject of Whitman. For Winters objected quite strongly to Whitman as a poet, as America’s secular Romantic saint, and as a popular “philosopher”. It’s fascinating that the book that attacks Whitman most often and most fiercely is the very book that Levine says changed his life (Levine listed Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as well, I should add). But despite the common view that Winters railed on Whitman often, Winters actually didn’t discuss Whitman extensively in this book or in any of his writings. He mentions Whitman just a dozen times or so in In Defense of Reason. The only extended discussion of Whitman’s ideas in his whole oeuvre -- and that only a couple pages long -- appears in the final essay of In Defense of Reason, “The Significance of The Bridge,” which is about Hart Crane and partially the relation of Crane’s ideas to Whitman’s.

For now, I must be content with saying that Winters ascertained that Whitman’s ideas ought perhaps to strike “terror” into us -- that’s the word Winters used. I don’t have time to go through the subject in depth or offer my assessment of Winters’s adverse opinions of Whitman. But maybe I’ll say this much: the reliance upon and praise of the wisdom of mediocrity and the native goodness of all people -- the tacit genius of every Tom, Dick, and Harry -- are matters Winters sternly denounced, while these are clearly extolled in Levine’s comments. Each little cosmos is as good as another?! That’s scarily close to what we could fairly describe as twaddle. To Winters such ideas opened the door to endless foolishness and even personal spiritual danger, as he discussed at length in the Crane essay. Here is his conclusion from that essay. Professor X is the representative of those academics who know the Romantic doctrines but do not take them seriously. What Winters says here concerns Emerson, whom he considered to be Whitman’s master:

Professor X will defend democracy in Emersonian terms, never stopping to consider that a defense of democracy which derives ultimately from the doctrine of natural goodness, of the wisdom of the untrained and mediocre mind, and of the sanctity of impulse is the worst kind of betrayal. He tells us that Emerson was an "idealist," but he does not tell us what kind. He tells us that Emerson taught self-reliance, but not that Emerson meant reliance of irresponsible impulse. He will cite us a dozen fragments of what might be mistaken for wisdom, and cite Emerson as the source; but he will neither admit what these fragments mean in the Emersonian system nor go to the trouble of setting them in a new system which would give them an acceptable meaning -- and which would no longer be Emersonianism.

I’ll come around to Whitman in time, since I have burdened myself with the obligation of discussing that passage of Levine more fully to justify my sidelong comment about how Winters would have taken it. (By the way, I comment upon this passage, rather differently, in the 7/24 entry my book A Year with Yvor Winters.) But taking on any such endeavor might be one of the most damning literary heresies of the present age possible: an objection to the bubbling boiling bombastic blather of Walt Whitman. Does Whitman go too far with his twaddle? Is Winters right in his rejection of Whitman and right for the right reasons? What’s the value in the heavily silted floods of his writing? Are his woolly ideas dangerous? Is he worth reading much? Does his work deserve its very high position in American literary culture? (Leaves of Grass is mentioned several times in the book I started with as having changed someone’s life.) Does it deserve any significant position? I’ll get to these matters -- I’ll get to them. In the meantime, go to In Defense of Reason.

Can Writing Be Dangerous?

I have been talking a great deal in this blog in its opening months about the relationship between Yvor Winters and Hart Crane, because that topic has been much in the cultural news of late (arising because of the publication of the Library of America edition of Hart Crane’s poems). The matter came up yet again in an essay by Adam Kirsch in the September edition of the journal Poetry on the anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginberg’s “Howl.” The essay is entitled, “Starving Hysterical Naked,” the last three words of the first line of the poem. Kirsch, who has written of Winters in a few of essays here and there, including in the New Criterion, wrote of Lionel Trilling’s reaction to Ginsberg’s poem in terms that have pertinence to the study of Winters:

This is the point at which Lionel Trilling's verdict on [“Howl”], that it was "dull," starts to look especially peculiar. Many sins might be laid at the door of Ginsberg and his poem, though it is impossible to separate the influence of the text from that of the period it inspired and came to symbolize, the Beat fifties and hippie sixties. The glorification of violence, the sentimentality about mental illness, the contempt for reason, the political self-righteousness, the waste of reformist energy in theatrical gestures, the confusion of narcissism with moral superiority: all that is worst about the counterculture is foreshadowed in "Howl" and Ginsberg's subsequent poems. But it would take a pretty jaded palate to find "Howl" dull.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t consider myself all that jaded, if I understand what Kirsch means by the term, but I find “Howl” a bore. It’s an unstructured, droning rant to my ear, and it quickly grows tiresome -- it even seemed dull in my earliest days in the serious study of literature, back in the mid 1970s. That I read it in the 70s might be important, since by the mid-70s weariness with the 60s had cured into a block of concrete in the heart. Kirsch’s piece gave me an itch to go reread the poem again, but I found it drudgery rather than an enlightening pleasure. There are a couple of nice turns of phrase, but the poem as a whole is a trainwreck of ideas -- a manic melange, to switch metaphors. You can pick little tidbits from the mass and sometimes find them interesting or even suggestive. But when you step back, there it is: a big, ugly trainwreck after all. I wouldn’t even say it is a poem, except by modern consent, and it isn’t very good prose, either. Kirsch then turns to the fears about writings like “Howl”, which he believes are of a species with Winters’s fears about Hart Crane’s dissolution, which, Winters believed, Romanticism engendered:

What Trilling really meant to communicate, I suspect, is not that "Howl" would fail to excite its readers, but that it would excite them in a way which Trilling himself, and many other imaginative people, had already judged disastrous. For while Ginsberg's belief in radical innocence and radical excess was new to the baby boomers, it was not at all new to Trilling, or to Modernists like Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, each of whom had experienced the suicide of Hart Crane as a parable of the personal cost of imaginative chaos. The antinomianism found in "Howl" was, in fact, one of the fundamental impulses of modern literature, and readers who were in their fifties when Ginsberg was in his twenties had wrestled with it long before. "It seems to me that the characteristic element of modern literature," Trilling wrote in an essay that was not about "Howl" but could have been, “is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it.... It asks us if we are saved or damned -- more than with anything else, our literature is concerned with salvation.”

Again on the shoulders of the principles underlying modern literature, as unsystematic as they are, a critic lays the suicide of Hart Crane. There, too, we read a rather severe, almost hysterical, word, “disastrous,” applied to a writing of just a couple thousand words. Using such words goes somewhat too far for me, as I have discussed in a couple of recent entries in this blog (see “Romanticism Leads to Madness, Reason to Evil?” and “Hart Crane and Connotation”). To my mind, it’s not that chaotic writing is so dangerous. It’s that it’s so dull, just as Trilling said. I don’t read serious literature in order to take a little dip into chaos or vicariously revel in someone else’s bad-boy shenanigans, but to discover truth on my own “quest for reality” (which was the title of Winters’s anthology of greatest poems). “Howl” is dull because it simply doesn’t offer much to think about, doesn’t take us into any human experiences and help us to understand them rationally, or aid us adjusting our emotions to a rational understanding of those experiences. The poem is a frenzied, overwrought mishmash, a pile of straining phrases and harebrained ideas that adds up to a loose compendium rather than a sustained meditation. It’s a rundown of the wild times Ginsburg and his friends had. Big deal. Is it “dangerous” to go through it all. It seems more just plain silly. It’s still surprising that anyone smart took this jejune stuff seriously.

Still, I suppose “Howl” is important historically and worth knowing for that reason, since it has had a significant influence on literature. (I think it’s worth knowing things in the Standard Canon just because the Standard Canon, as Harold Bloom said, is made up of those works that have had the greatest influence). It’s important to know it because of the insight it gives us into the times it concerns. And even a few ideas in the mountain it piles up might have slight value, like Goodwill trinkets found in a trash heap. But as a whole the poem is not much and not worth concentrating on too closely, except as an historical artifact.

Do you, my readers, think that it’s dangerous personally or corporately to write as Ginsburg wrote and read what Ginsburg wrote in the way he wrote it? I’m still not sold on that longstanding idea of Winters’s, to which Kirsch gives his implied assent. Is Romanticism, as spread by literature, a cause of some of the dire problems in our time? In reading Winters, and Kirsch hints at the idea too, one would almost think so. But such matters require careful thought.

Romanticism Leads to Madness, Reason to Evil?

One last time, I want to come back to Hilton Als’s review in the New Yorker of the handsome new edition of Hart Crane’s poems (and letters) in the Library of America. Als’s review draws attention to the issue of homophobia, suggesting that it played a larger role in Crane’s psychological difficulties than many once believed and that it influenced Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and others among Crane’s critics to some degree in their objections to some aspects of his work and life:

For readers like Tate and Winters, Crane’s suicide was the inevitable, artistically fitting conclusion to a deeply disordered life, and the chief symptom of that disorder was his homosexuality. In Tate’s major essay on Crane’s poetry, what was ostensibly literary criticism now appears as Freud-era homophobic code: Tate speaks of Crane’s “failure to impose his will upon experience,” his “locked-in sensibility [and] insulated egoism.” Winters, still more explicit, regards Crane’s sexuality as comparable to his alcoholism, a “weakness” that he “cultivated on principle.”

This last comment about Winters is accurate, but whether that Winters believed that the “chief symptom” of the disorder in Crane’s life was homosexuality, as Als implies, is questionable (I do not know about Tate, though I’d be interested to hear from my readers on what they might know about him in this matter). In the essay Als quotes from (a passage of “The Significance of the Bridge,” the last essay of In Defense of Reason), Winters does imply that homosexuality is a weakness of like kind to alcoholism. Yet in all my reading in Winters about Crane, including in his letters, I see little evidence that he considered homosexuality in itself to be sinful or evil or some sort of gross aberration. It is possible that his reference to homosexuality as a “weakness” was based on widespread assumptions about what we more recently have called the “homosexual lifestyle” -- that, to put it bluntly (for I see no other way to put it), the homosexual is commonly promiscuous.

I believe that this is most likely what Winters meant in pairing homosexuality and alcoholism in the passage. But whether this small distinction diminishes Winters’s fault or whether Crane’s homosexuality was indeed a significant element in his “dissolution,” which, Winters argues, led to his eventual suicide are matters that I will have to deliberate. Also worth pondering is whether promiscuity of any kind can or should be considered a symptom of dissolution. Addiction to alcohol is commonly considered to be psychologically and spiritually injurious, but Winters’s implied relationship between moral dissipation and Romanticism is certainly little better than tenuous. I note that Als doesn’t make a to-do about Winters’s apparent disapproval of homosexuality, assuming, it appears, that the censure of homosexuality was a matter of course in the 1920s.

On the larger question of the causes of Crane’s general dissoluteness (if his behavior can be characterized as such, which I concede is a wide-open question), it is very clear that Winters thought that Crane’s hyper-Romanticism was the final cause of his dissipation and moral difficulties, manifested in various “symptoms,” and finally bearing bad fruit in his psychic collapse. For Winters, Crane’s story became a singularly decisive test case of Romanticism, as many critics have pointed out recently. Yet is it true as well, as critics lately have been stating regularly and appears true, that mostly as a result of this one stark and massive failure of Romanticism in the life of Hart Crane, Winters damned Romanticism as a whole and extolled Reason? Perhaps putting it that strongly makes the case appear a bit overstated. Winters had many other reasons for opposing Romanticism than its outcomes in the life and death of Hart Crane -- though it is indisputable that Crane’s coming to such a bad end profoundly and decisively burdened Winters’s thinking against Romanticism. He referred to the Crane "test case" over and again, sometimes quite elliptically, in his writings.

But, accepting for the moment that Crane’s suicide can be attributed mostly to Romanticism, is Winters’s case against Romanticism on the grounds of its consequences in the life of this one man, Hart Crane, in itself reasonable? Can we rationally draw any firm, general conclusions about the value or truth of particular Romantic ideas or the general system (which is so diverse as to be almost indefinable) from the purported effects Romantic ideas had in the life of one person? Winters’s argument from Crane against Romanticism in itself constitutes a non sequitor, does it not?

Consider this: if Romanticism as a system of ideas (so wildly varied that calling it a ”system” appears to be nonsense) is damned because of its evil effects in the life of one man (laying aside for the moment the question of whether Crane's blood stains Romanticism’s hands alone), can Reason alike be damned because of its evil consequences in one instance? I ask this because another recent New Yorker book review illustrates an extreme failure of Reason. The review, by Adam Gopnik, concerns two new books about the French Revolution, one a new history specifically of the Reign of Terror and the other a new biography of Maximilian Robespierre, one of the Terror’s architects. This review is still available on line at:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/060605crat_atlarge

To me, it appears definite, judging from the evidence of the conduct of the Terror by the determinedly reasonable Robespierre, that even Reason can at times go wickedly astray. So what keeps Reason from destruction? That’s a central question for Wintersians. It’s something I will be pondering in the weeks ahead.

Here are the conclusions Gopnik draws about the final works of Robespierre, sobering thoughts for all committed to Reason:

The bloodlust of the time [of the French Revolution] makes the attempt to trace the Terror to any single intellectual source, or peculiar circumstance -— to Enlightenment rationalism gone mad, or to the paranoia of the encircled Republicans -— feel inadequate to the Terror’s essential nature, which was that it didn’t matter what the ideology was. The argument that a taste for the ideal and the tabula rasa leads to terror, after all, would be more convincing if its opposite —- a desire for an organic, authentic, traditional society -— didn’t lead to terror, too. The Red Terror led to a White Terror; Robespierre’s head had hardly fallen before the Gilded Youth were attacking the now helpless Jacobins. It sometimes seems as if history had deliberately placed Hitler and Stalin side by side at the climax of the horror of modern history simply to demonstrate that the road to Hell is paved with any intention you like; a planned, pseudo-rationalist utopianism and an organic, racial, backward-looking Romanticism ended up with the same camps and the same carnage. The historical lesson of the first Terror is not that reason devours its own but that reason cannot stop us from devouring each other.

To sum up Yvor Winters's ideas on a complex issue very simply, Winters enjoined a balance between Reason and emotion in works of literary art and in life, with Reason standing in control of the emotions. Late in his career, especially in his final work Forms of Discovery, he even carefully laid out the good Romanticism has done for literature, particularly in giving us examples and models by which to perceive the world more clearly and fully. Yet the dangers of Reason is a matter we must ponder carefully as we study the critical ideas of Yvor Winters and his case against Romanticism.

Hart Crane and Connotation

Hilton Als, in his New Yorker review of the new edition of Hart Crane’s poems for the Library of America, quotes a famed passages in the history of English literary theory. The general ideas expressed in the quote that follows, ideas not original with Hart Crane, certainly, but which found a passionate champion in him, have now covered the literary culture as the waters cover the sea:

[A reply to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe] has become a key document of poetic modernism. Crane admitted that he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness... than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.” What Monroe saw as nonsense Crane insisted was a higher kind of sense. He wrote, “The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority.”

Do you not hear a lot of Mallarme in those words from Crane, as well as Winters’s incisive and valuable discussion of Mallarme in Primitivism and Decadence? (I should note in passing that Mallarme’s poetry has enjoyed a resurgence of interest of late as well. Search on google on Mallarme and you will find plenty of new commentary on his work. One article that was particularly insightful, from a couple years ago, was John Simon’s review in The New Criterion of a new edition of Mallarme’s poems. I think that’s still available on line.)

As a Wintersian, how might one reply to Crane? Here is how I would: A poet has the “right” to do anything he damn well pleases. A poet can write gibberish in dog doo for all poetry has to do with any concept of “rights.” A poet, too, can take as many liberties as he likes, throw away all conventions, abandon all principles; he has the “authority” to write in any way he might please. But though the poet can write as he pleases, the reader or the critic, especially the Wintersian, is not bound to approve or sanction, canonize or even publish, anything a poet writes with an intense emphasis on connotation.

As I have already written in this blog, I fail to understand what the hubbub about Hart Crane’s poetry is about. In fact, I fail to find this fascination in literary culture with loosey-goosey connotation to be mostly tiresome. Crane has a way of writing with great verve and breathless excitement and –- what shall I call it? -- mythic exuberance. But what he has to say, in my judgment, amounts to a thimble-full of understanding in a two-inch-deep puddle of emotions. For the furious emotions Crane expresses and evokes in his poetry, through his overemphasis on connotation, for me always immediately lose almost all their force when I lift my eyes from the page. The reason is that they are almost entirely unmoored to any motivating concepts, any experiences outside the fizzing of his own brain cells. He often writes like a madman, feeling emotions that are wildly out of proportion to anything that’s really going on around him -- in a way that seems similar to some forms of mentally illness. Reading Crane is much like trying to find one’s way in a forest by the intermittent light of fireworks going off in the sky above (to reuse a wonderful analogy of Dick Davis’s from a 2003 Wintersian essay in The New Criterion).

The Crane quote brought to mind Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, a book which seems to have influenced Yvor Winters quite deeply, especially early in his career. In reading Crane’s declaration again, I thought of a small passage from the chapter “Romantic Irony” that has always stuck with me:

The romanticist is constantly yielding to the “spell” of this or the “lure” of that, of the “call” of some other thing. But when the wonder and strangeness that he is chasing are overtaken, they at once cease to be wondrous and strange, while the gleam is already dancing over some other object on the distant horizon. For nothing is in itself romantic, it is only imagining that makes it so. Romanticism is the pursuit of the element of illusion in things for its own sake; it is in short the cherishing of glamour. The word glamour introduced into literary usage from popular Scotch usage by Walter Scott itself illustrates this tendency. Traced etymologically, it turns out to be the same word as grammar. In an illiterate age, to know how to write at all; was a weird and magical accomplishment, but in an educated age, nothing is so directly unromantic, so lacking glamour, as grammar.

For Crane, as for so many writers in modern times, the disciplines of Reason lost their gleam, their romantic allure.

But as always, I would be happy to hear from others on Crane’s work in light of Winters’s discussions of it.

New Edition of Hart Crane's Poetry

A Library of America edition of the poetry (and letters) of Hart Crane was released recently, an event which has given rise to a number of reviews and essays about Crane in major American magazines and journals. Some of these essays have mentioned Yvor Winters, in regard to perhaps the most famous role he has played in American literary history so far: his friendship with Hart Crane. The New Yorker review of the new edition of the poems, by Hilton Als, is well worth reading and mentions Winters several times, and without rancor or condemnation (thankfully!). Als offers some valuable insights into the poetry of Crane. The essay can be found at:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061009crbo_books1

Here’s a few quotations from Als’s review, with some comments from me:

The interpretation of Crane’s life as a dire fable of the age has shaped his reputation ever since. Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, two of his best friends and two of the best critics of modern American poetry [Comment: there’s a wonderful endorsement of Winters coming from the finest and most important magazine in US literary culture], saw his story primarily as a warning. For Winters, he was a noble spirit destroyed by false principles, “a saint of the wrong religion”; for Tate, his poetry had “incalculable moral value,” but mainly because “it reveals our defects in their extremity.”

Comment: I have trouble seeing the incalculable moral value of Crane’s poetry, though I do see that he could turn a string of magnificent phrases at times. Indeed, I see little moral value in his work at all. To be honest, I consider his poetry of little value in any area of life, though it does have its incidental pleasures, the grandiloquent mythical effusiveness of it. But I cannot think of one Crane poem that has given me any deep insight into any significant human experience, not even the love poem Winters praised so highly as Crane’s finest work, “Voyages II.” Further, I’ve never read a commentary on Crane’s poetry, including Als’s smattering of comments on the importance of Crane’s work, that gave me any clear indication of what readers find to be so valuable in Crane. I’d be interested in the opinions of my readers on what they find significant in Crane’s poetry.

At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature. Still, the question of what Hart Crane “stands for” in American literature is difficult to answer. His work resists the complacency of canonization, blazing with qualities that are the opposite of classical: precocity, obscurity, and verbal recklessness.

Comment: I have read a study of Crane, in contrast to this last claim of Als’s, that argues that Crane’s work stands in the classical tradition, a modern flowering of English Renaissance verse, principally Shakespearean verse. I think, however, that the last three nouns in that passage accurately summarize the character of Crane’s poetry and are the reason I do not rate it highly and do not get much from reading it. I notice that John Fraser chose a couple Crane poems for his New Book of Verse, a matter I shall return to some time later as I continue to evaluate Fraser’s choices for that highly important anthology. Winters certainly praised a couple of Crane’s poems in the loftiest language, even to the degree of calling “Voyages II” nearly perfect. I will need to come back to that matter, I think. After years pondering the matter, I do not think Crane’s work deserves praise anywhere near so high.

Many twentieth-century poets were heavy drinkers, but Crane was almost unique in preferring to write while he was actually drunk.

Comment: This has become a commonplace of Crane biographers, to go into details about his alcoholism and his personal difficulties, particularly with his parents. I wonder how much more booze -- and his psychological defects and social troubles, particularly with the apparent homophobia he faced -- had to do with his suicide than his Whitmanian beliefs about the value of intuition or impulse, which Winters so forcefully argued was the principal cause of his suicide (the argument is found in “The Significance of the Bridge, or What Are We to Think of Professor X” from In Defense of Reason). I tend to think, after much reflection on the matter, that Crane was probably driven to suicide, in significant part, by demon rum and the incidental cruelties of homophobia, rather than his hyper-Romanticism. Does this invalidate Winters’s argument? That’s something to ponder. I think it likely that Winters’s case is not as strong as it once seemed to me.

I believe I will have more to offer on Als’s essay.