Hart Crane: The "Architectural Art"

Abstract

Hart Crane:The "Architectural Art" Jo Gill (bio) In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a "suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age."1 He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America's myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis.2 Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenthcentury Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America's tensile complexity. I don't demur from this position; but I do argue that for Crane it was not only the Bridge as manifestation in stone and steel of his nation's past, present and future, that mattered. As important were the larger technologies, practices, and discourses of architecture which produced the Bridge, determined his experience of it, and shaped his understanding of its significance. Another way of putting this is to say that the Bridge (and The Bridge) are necessary, but not entirely sufficient, components of Crane's construction of modernity and that to understand his emerging vision of America, we need to look to his larger engagement with contemporary architecture in all of its variety and potency. The purpose of this article, then, is to bring Crane's architectural interests to the fore, to address the specificity of architectural allusion in his poetry, and to move beyond an assessment of the Bridge's symbolic value and towards a more granular reading of the way architecture functions across his oeuvre, of the forms it takes, and the meanings it assumes. It goes without saying that poetry provides Crane with a medium in which to [End Page 1] discuss architecture. More importantly, architecture provides him with a way of thinking and speaking about poetry. First in early poems from White Buildings (1926) and subsequently in The Bridge, he engages in an assessment of architectural effect while also testing the capacity of poetry to deliver such an account. So, while The Bridge is a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, it is also a poem about poetry. Crane is not alone among his contemporaries in reading architecture as an important index of the age.3 Wallace Stevens's idea of order derives in part from his understanding of the aesthetics of architectural modernity (see, for example, the steel crossbeam in the closing stanza of "The Motive for Metaphor," the austere style of "Anecdote of the Jar," and the meditation on use and ornament in "Architecture").4 Carl Sandburg, from his Chicago Poems (1916) onwards, portrays the materiality of the city's distinctive architecture. In William Carlos Williams's work ("Flight to the City" and "Young Love," for example, from Spring and All of 1923), architecture's new dynamism frees the imagination.5 Contemporary little magazines such as Others frequently featured poetry on architectural themes, including Sherwood Anderson's "Song of the Soul of Chicago" (1917) which echoes Sandburg and anticipates Crane in its opening lines: "On the bridges, on the bridges, swooping and rising, whirling and circling. Back to the bridges, always the bridges."6 Each of these poets grapples with new ideas about form and function or, in architectural critic Sigfried Giedion's terms, with "the ways in which space, volumes, and materials existed for feeling."7 But it is Crane for whom the association between poetry and architecture is most potent. For Crane, the two disciplines, poetry and architecture, are mutually constitutive and interchangeable. In his 1930 essay, "Modern Poetry," he asserts that "poetry is an architectural art."8 And at times, for example in the closing section, "Atlantis," of The Bridge, his prolonged meditation on the properties of the Bridge is couched almost entirely in the language that one might use to describe the properties of poetry. He speaks of its upward sweep (the reach towards transcendence), of its use of line and light ("[l]ong tiers of windows" which "crown the hill and gleam"), of sound (whispering, sibylline voices), pattern (flicker, stream...