The Pilgrim's Progress as Source for Stephen Crane's The Black Riders

Abstract

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Stephen Crane's The Black Riders in the spring of 1895, one of the major concerns of critics addressing themselves to Crane's work has been an attempt to locate the sources of those strange poems-this despite Hamlin Garland's well-known eye-witness account of how Crane drew off his poems as if obeying the dictates of a poetic ghost at his shoulder.1 The reason for this search lies not so much in the critics' preoccupation with a nebulous literary continuum as in their profound desire to familiarize themselves with the strange. For Crane's poems were strange when they first appeared and they remain so today; anyone attempting to define their nature feels first compelled to establish reference points in self-defense. This dire compulsion has led to vastly diverse findings in the sixty years since the appearance of the poems; the origins of Crane's poetic style have been variously located in the work of Olive Schreiner, Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and W. E. Henley.2 Yet in every instance, these individuals can be said to have influenced only one or two of the poems in the volume, if indeed they influenced Crane at all. In none of their work does one find a comprehensive or profound relationship with Crane. As a matter of fact, all attempts to define Crane's work in terms of contemporary influences seem extraordinarily pale before Howells's penetrating remark that Crane was a writer who had sprung into life fully armed.3 There were, of course, influences at work behind The Black