Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, Rebuttal and Review: A New Crane Letter

Abstract

J OHN UNTERECKER in Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane describes the fellow writers with whom the poet regularly corresponded, Allen Tate, Gorham Munson, and Waldo Frank, as just confidants but something more: that real audience, the friends of good taste, for whom every artist works.' Another friend who fulfilled the same role as did these men was the poet and professor of literature, Yvor Winters. Thomas Parkinson in his study of the correspondence of Crane and Winters writes, It is tempting to think of Crane and Winters as almost allegorically antithetical figures: the critical professor and the bohemian poet, and portrays their friendship as ''one of the most interesting and symptomatic literary relationships of the twentieth century.2 Their correspondence, initiated by Winters in 1926,3 ended following his review of Crane's The Bridge in 1930,4 but not before Crane had responded with a furious letter that Winters did not care to keep.5 This letter has been alluded to by various critics, and Crane himself discussed the letter with friends. He wrote to Isador Schneider: Had it not been for our previous extended correspondence I would not, of course, have written him about it. But as things stood I could hardly let silence infer an acceptance on my part of all the wilful distortions of meaning, misappropriations of opinion, pedantry and pretentious classification-besides illogic-which his review presents par excellence. I must read what prejudices he defends, I understand, against writing about subways, in the anti-