<i>Hart Crane: After His Lights</i> (review)

Abstract

Hart Crane: After His Lights. Brian Reed. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. viii+312 pp. $65.00 (cloth). This good book about Hart Crane's poetry - the first monograph on in over ten years, and the first since Langdon Hammer's big edited volume of Crane's letters (O My Land My Friends, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997) - pursues three strong arguments, and one weak one. All four might change (at least slightly) how we read other modernist poets, Williams among them. first strong argument has to do with Crane's forebears: prior critics have almost uniformly found his models in an American Romantic tradition stemming from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Reed shows that Crane's preoccupations, his meters and stanzas, and his whole way of thinking about what poems can do, owe to the late nineteenth century's British Decadents - to Oscar Wilde (whom Crane's first published poem memorialized) but above all to Algernon Charles Swinburne, whom read avidly and imitated covertly. This mannerist (17) legacy makes look more 'British' in his poetic sensibility than scholars have heretofore seen (27). Pursuing the sexual implications of decadent styles, Reed also likens to Djuna Barnes, both queer writers whose 'broken' decadent forms [. . .] acknowledge the obsolescence, the ruination, of fin de siecle camp (51) in the wake of the Wilde trials. semantically shaky, aurally lush, sometimes redundant verbal world of Swinburne - especially of his now little-read long poems - helps show why Crane's poems sound as they do: it might prompt critics even of such defiantly American writers as Williams to ask what other transatlantic links we have missed. (There's so much of the Spanish stuff that is unknown, old and new, Williams told James Laughlin [SL 1 83]; despite such studies as Julio Marzan's Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams [Austin: U of Texas P, 1994], that may still be the case.) Reed's second, and ambitious, argument connects Crane's poetic innovations to the history of music, and to the history of technology. composed with a phonograph at top volume, playing nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera and orchestral music (such as Ravel's Bolero) if available, the day's pop hits if not. These earsplitting, sometimes drunken bouts of writing while the same 78 played, over and over, preceded - for the poems regarded as finished - sober sessions of editing and revision. This part of Reed's study displays simultaneous and majestic commands of biographical and manuscript minutiae, of musicology and reception history (what did Wagner signify in America in 1 923?) and of the history of recording (how did most people listen to 78s in the 1920s? how much music fit on each side?). Reed finds both an analogy, and a homology, between the ways Crane's words work, on the one hand, and on the other the Craneian experience of hearing - out of sequence and repeated ad lib, pared down, and strung - short parts of operatic and orchestral compositions, as would have heard them on his post-Edison but pre-LP 78s (122-23). Here is historical, multidisciplinary scholarship at its best. It turns out to be biographical scholarship too, since Crane treat[ed] his romance with [the sailor Emil] Opffer in the same manner that he treated Bolero, repeating its erotic buildup over and over, with no clear sense of plot, and no finale (115). Crane's modes of listening and his tastes in nineteenth-century poetry together let Reed explain, and celebrate, the absence of something Crane's earlier critics sought: an implied development, or argument, or plot, among the sections of Bridge. There isn't one; there doesn't have to be (and it might be heterosexist to think otherwise). Swinburne's long poem Tristram of Lyonesse attempts to transpose Wagnerian instrumentation into English verse, and The Bridge often sounds like Tristram [. …