Hart Crane Research Articles

Irwin on Fitzgerald

Irwin on Fitzgerald James L. W. West III (bio) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence” by John T. Irwin ( Johns Hopkins University Press , 2014 . xiv + 234 pages. $39.95 ) This new book by John Irwin brings to completion a trilogy in which he examines the work of four writers—Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges; Hart Crane; and now F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the writings of each, Irwin recognizes a deep engagement with Platonic idealism. Certainly this is correct for Fitzgerald, a romantic whose fiction is marked throughout by a fondness for Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne—and by an obsession with the “golden moment” of fulfillment that most of his protagonists are pursuing. Some of them achieve such a moment, but it is evanescent, vanishing when they attempt to arrest and preserve it. This is a personal book for Irwin, growing out of a fascination with Fitzgerald that began over fifty years ago when he first read The Great Gatsby. Irwin’s tone is agreeably self-revelatory—about his own life, his previous writings, and his long experience in reading and teaching Fitzgerald. It is a great pleasure to make one’s way through his extended analysis of the Fitzgerald oeuvre. He possesses a fluent style and a well-furnished mind; he deploys quotations from Fitzgerald’s fiction and letters with great skill. The discussion ranges widely, from the songs of Cole Porter to the myths of Pygmalion and Galatea, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Asides about Freud, Veblen, Eliot, and Sartre are on the mark. One of the works that Irwin explores for supporting ideas is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), a seminal work of sociology that helps to open up new interpretations of some of Fitzgerald’s best-known characters—Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, Dick Diver from Tender Is the Night, and Basil Duke Lee, the autobiographical hero of a series of superb stories about adolescence that Fitzgerald published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928 and 1929. All of these characters are playacting, inventing social roles for themselves that, they imagine, will allow them to achieve their dreams of status and fulfillment. One of the great mysteries about Fitzgerald’s career is that he did not put such characters on the stage. He spent much of his apprenticeship scribbling plays for an amateur theater group in his native St. Paul, Minnesota; he also wrote some unusually good lyrics for the Triangle Club productions at Princeton between 1915 and 1917. But his one professional stab at Broadway, a satirical play called The Vegetable, flopped in tryouts in Atlantic City, sending Fitzgerald scurrying back to the mass-circulation “slicks”—the Post, Liberty, Metropolitan, Redbook, et al.—for which he had learned to manufacture top-drawer short stories. And he met with only limited success when he tried to write for the movies near the end of his career. What [End Page xxxvii] Irwin discerns, however, is that a marked theatricality shows itself in the fiction from beginning to end, in the portrayal of personality and above all in the handling of dialogue. Irwin’s analysis of these elements in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night is fresh and engaging; his interpretation of The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel that Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death, is as good as any I have read. By taking an approach other than the chronological, by organizing his analysis around themes and narrative approaches, Irwin fleshes out some new insights. I was taken by his identification of contrasts between the South and the North, not only in the three stories that Fitzgerald sets in the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, but also in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Swimmers,” two works of short fiction in which I had never thought to look for a southern element. Fitzgerald romanticizes the South in all of these stories, playing its slow eroticism against the frigidity of the North, showing his sympathy for the southern concern for manners, family, and the past. Almost the only thing I would disagree about...

"Beyond religions and even beyond mankind": Karl Shapiro's Jewish Walt Whitman

The Jewish-American poet most widely associated with Whit- man is Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg famously adopted Whitman into his Beat-generation poetry, with its countercultural agenda, flaunting of the body and sexuality, and style replete with long, enumerative lines.1 Yet, extensive critical attention to Ginsberg has fostered the misconception that he is the primary, or sole, Jewish-American poet with a significant relationship to Whitman. In fact, numerous Jewish-American poets have upheld such relationships, although most remain underexamined.2 Fail- ing to interrogate these connections not only limits our understanding of Whitman's role in American literature and culture;it also limits our understanding of a mode by which Jews have shaped and defined their poetry and identity in America.Karl Shapiro, author of the seminal, Jewish-themed collection of poetry, Poems of a Jew (1958), is a poet whose relationship to Whitman has been regrettably dwarfed by Ginsberg's.3 Shapiro, too, was an adamant champion of Whitman; yet, the poetic, political, and social implications of this championing have been thus far overlooked. With the exception of a very few critical investigations, in fact, many aspects of Shapiro's work have suffered neglect in recent decades.4 The decline in Shapiro's career and reputation from its height in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s has been attributed to the vicious public attacks he leveled upon leading Modernist figures of the time, primarily Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as well as W. B. Yeats. Crucially, Shapiro's opposition to these figures, whom he perceived to be exclusionary, right wing, and anti-Semitic, was profoundly motivated by his identity as a Jew in gen- eral, and a Jewish poet in particular.Whitman was not merely a marginal player in Shapiro's confronta- tion with these Modernist poets, whose opinions of Whitman were at best ambivalent, at worst hostile. Rather, Whitman was at center stage.5 Never one to modulate his viewpoints, openly lauded Whitman in essays, poetry, and interviews: Walt Whitman has had more influ- ence on my poetic thinking than anybody.6 valued Whitman above other writers he respected, such as William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Ran- dall Jarrell, and Hart Crane. 7 This essay will demonstrate how fashioned Whitman into an ally against the more conservative elements of the Modernist poetic milieu.8 Shapiro, experiencing himself mar- ginalized from the mainstream as a Jew and poet, views Whitman in a similarly marginalized position in American society. Indeed, Shapiro's portrayals of Jews and Jewishness in his writing can be seen to parallel his portrayals of Whitman, thus demonstrating how comes to imagine Whitman implicitly as a Jew.This study of and Whitman seeks to provide a more nu- anced understanding of how Whitman features in American literature more broadly, and the Jewish-American poetic tradition more specifi- cally. We will see how, as interprets Whitman, Whitman himself is inevitably transformed, politicized, and ethnicized.Karl Shapiro's Outsider IdentityTo grasp why found such significance in Whitman, it is crucial to pause on Shapiro's sense of identity, which, as an American, a Jew, and a poet, was vexed. Ironically, in terms of national identity, many scholars considered to be quintessentially American, noting his use of idiomatic language and depictions of middle-class life.9 Hayden Carruth stated, Shapiro was derivative but never imitative. He was an American.10 Shapiro's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection V-Letter and Other Poems (1945), written during his World War II military service, further solidified his reputation as an American poet. Hilene Flanz- baum writes that the various personas assumed by in his war poetry made him broadly appealing: Shapiro has written poems about being Jewish and Christian, Native-American and Black, wounded and healthy, and it is indeed part of his point that as the composite American-and most important, as the ideal American soldier-he can be any of these things (263). …

On Holding and Being Held: Hart Crane’s Queer Intimacy

And have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the of walking in across the most bridge of the world, the enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as have never walked and never can walk another. --Hart Crane In his rapturous description of crossing Brooklyn Emil Opffer, the sailor whom he shared the most intense affair of his short life, the lovestruck Hart Crane imagines New York's monument to modernity as a kind of rocking cradle. Crane's beautiful bridge encloses and lifts Hart and Emil, offering refuge and support while they experience their ecstasy (Letters 181). Just as a cradle replicates the environment of the mother's body, Crane's experience of the bridge--whose cables breathe as its arms lift in the address To Brooklyn Bridge that begins his 1930 epic The Bridge--also recalls the earliest scene of intersubjective intimacy (Poems 46). For the object relations psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, is both the first stage of satisfactory parental care and a form of loving. Winnicott stresses that the term holding denotes not only the actual physical of the infant which starts of course in inter-uterine life, but also the total environmental provision prior to the concept of living with (Maturational 43). (1) Yet beside the image of being safely held, up, and, implicitly (in their ec-stasy) together by the other, the passage depicts the intimate hand-holding of the two lovers. The symmetrical touching of hand in hand, performed syntactically in the phrase's chiasmus, contrasts the clear asymmetry of the bridge's maternal holding. In what we might be tempted to dismiss as an embarrassingly sentimental letter, Crane hints at the possible complexities of intimacy, suggesting two distinct models of object relations; two distinct somatic and affective partnerships. This article explores intimate contact in Crane's two published volumes of poetry--White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge--and in several of his uncollected poems. am interested in the ways Crane's work explores the conceptual and spatial bounds of intimacy--especially how it relies on confusion between sexual and non-sexual registers and affects, and is predicated on a dynamic between containment and space. Evoking Winnicott's concept of unintegration--a state in which one can safely experience the feeling of falling apart because another holds the environment--I explore an alternative to the Lacanian emphasis on jouissance that has dominated queer readings of Crane's poetry. Finally argue that Crane's poetry articulates (and enacts) an intense desire for a hard-won reciprocal intimacy based on recognition, a form of intersubjective exchange that may be illuminated by the psychoanalysis of Jessica Benjamin. Following Benjamin, we might characterize the two distinct models of intimate partnership in Crane's Brooklyn letter by the terms and complementarity. Classical psychoanalysis, Benjamin argues, has stressed complementarity in interaction over mutuality. The other is represented as an answer, and the self as the need; the other is the breast, and the self is the hunger; the other actively holding, the self is actively being held (47-48). Significantly, Benjamin claims that such complementary dual unity forms the basic structure of domination, while mutuality forms the path to recognition and equality. want to suggest that the distinction between these relationships is key to Crane's exploration of intimacy. While Crane's lyric I sometimes wants or even needs to be held, he also aspires towards a form of recognition characterized by such tropes as mutual looking and handholding. As Langdon Hammer notes, Hands and eyes are the parts of the body that fashion bonds in Crane's poetry, and the marks that they frequently bear testify to the extreme difficulty of this task: 'blamed bleeding hands' in 'For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,' the swimmers' 'lost morning eyes' in 'Voyages II' (130). …

Christian Tears; Pagan Smiles: Hart Crane’s “Lachrymae Christi”

When American poet Hart Crane declares in a letter, “I felt the two worlds. And at once,” he speaks bluntly of the governing tension of his poetry: the knocking of Harold Hart Crane’s finite language against the hard, transparent ceiling beyond which he senses the divine. Crane’s first collection, White Buildings, often shows signs of visionary frustration. But in “Lachrymae Christi,” the most difficult poem in White Buildings, Crane’s vision dilates to immense possibilities of union between the material and the spirit worlds, between what is time-bound and what is timeless. This poem, both its poetic effect and its spiritual purpose, can be most sympathetically read as mystical. Because the tonal movement toward rapture in “Lachrymae Christi” resonates against the poetry and theology of Renaissance mystics such as St. John of the Cross, we can situate the poem in the context of ancient patterns of western mysticism in order to reclaim what has long been seen as an opaque and elusive poem. “Lachrymae Christi” rewards this reading of its mystical poetics with line after line of quivering wordplay, startlingly fresh religious allusion, and subtle thematic polyphony as it interweaves Christian and pagan traditions of regeneration.

Palimtextual Tracts: Susan Howe’s Rearticulation of Place

Palimtextual Tracts:Susan Howe’s Rearticulation of Place Mandy Bloomfield (bio) In an account of the circumstances under which she wrote the poem “Thorow” during an extended stay at Lake George in 1987, Susan Howe writes: If there is a Spirit of Place that Spirit had me in thrall. Day after day I watched the lake and how weather and light changed it. I think I was trying to paint a landscape . . . but my vision of the lake was not so much in space as in time. I was very aware of the commercialization and near ruin at the edge of the water, in the town itself, all around—but I felt outside of time or in an earlier time and that was what I had to get on paper. For some reason this beautiful body of water has attracted violence and greed ever since the Europeans first saw it. I thought I could feel it when it was pure, enchanted, nameless. There never was such a pure place. In all nature there is violence. Still it must have been wonderful at first sight. Uninterrupted nature usually is a dream enjoyed by the spoilers and looters—my ancestors. It’s a first dream of wildness that most of us need in order to breathe; and yet to inhabit a wilderness is to destroy it. An eternal contradiction. (“Difficulties” 20–21) [End Page 665] Here we see the poet positioning herself ambivalently within a powerful tradition of “the poetry of place.” From the narratives of the earliest European settlers, through the Romantic writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, to the modern poetry of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, and Gary Snyder, landscape and geography have played a central, albeit shifting, role in the American literary imagination. Howe explicitly invokes D. H. Lawrence’s notion of a “Spirit of Place,” which he understood as a “terrestrial magnetism,” an elemental “vital effluence . . . vibration . . . chemical exhalation” (6) infused, as if by osmosis, into American writing. Finding this mystical sense of connection between writing and place compelling, she articulates a yearning to transfer onto paper something of the landscape’s precolonial “wildness,” its “vital effluence” untainted by the damage of subsequent history. But her initial “if” implies skepticism toward such notions. In particular, she highlights how historical violence has shaped this place and her relation to it, and also how, as the descendent of “spoilers and looters,” she is implicated in this history. Furthermore, she recognizes that the very fantasy of “uninterrupted nature” in which she momentarily indulges is itself a construction that emerges from this history and culture of appropriation. Howe’s prose thus oscillates between a seemingly naive desire for an encounter with a primordial realm “outside of time” and a heightened awareness of the historical forces that have shaped the landscape and necessarily mediate all responses to it, including the very desire for unmediated encounter. This is indeed a poetics of place caught in “eternal contradiction.” Such conflicting impulses are typical of Howe’s poetics more generally. As Brian Reed has so cogently observed, “[a] duck-rabbit combination of skepticism and transcendentalism is . . . a foundational part of Howe’s worldview” (par. 25). I want to suggest that this characteristic feature of her work is particularly salient for environmentally oriented debates about the poetics of place. The “eternal contradiction” performed by Howe’s place-based imagination corresponds quite strikingly with an argument in ecocritical circles between strongly constructionist perspectives and what Greg Garrard neatly characterizes as “the poetics of authenticity,” which seeks an “unmediated encounter with the real world that rescues [End Page 666] the subject from the corrupt modern world of representation and simulation” (168). This tension has been present within ecocriticism since its beginnings in the 1990s, when this emergent field defined itself against the poststructuralist “linguistic turn” in the humanities, seeking to reinstate nature as referent in the face of very real anthropogenic destruction. In Kate Soper’s ubiquitously cited formulation, “It is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the ‘real’ thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level...

“Needing to Summon the Others”: Archival Research as Séance in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars

Nature is a Haunted House-but Art-a House that tries to be haunted-Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson 554A haze / Blink into aching lost / Only words remain / print is available-Susan Howe, unpublished poem1The only real in writing is writing itself-William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge 13.BecAuse she attends to writing as a residual manifestation of a fragmented self, and because of her opaque texts-cut up, taped together, and, at points, overlapping-Susan Howe is often cast as a post-modern Language poet with historicist leanings.2 Spontaneous Particulars, however, emphasizes Howe's indebtedness to modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. As does Williams in In American Grain (1939), which Michael Palmer describes as bearing the same relationship to a consciousness of American language and speech as one finds in Howe's creative scholarship, she digs into layers of writing several levels beneath modernism (My Emily Dickinson, back cover). Through archival research, Howe investigates American ground as it appears in writings by Nathanael Hawthorne, Jonathan Edwards, and Noah Webster and reproductions of cloth patches associated with otherwise unacknowledged figure, Susan Edwards.3 The bits of fabric testify to exclusionary, even violent, character of archival memory.4 Howe points out, and dress fragments, a pair of silk (21) represent only material reminder of a gifted, learned woman in vast Edwards archives at Yale's Beinecke, which includes over 1,200 sermons by Susan's brother, Jonathan, New England evangelical preacher credited with helping inaugurate Great Awakening in first half of 18th century. As with Andrei Codrescu's Bibliodeath, which describes gruesome blood and brain matter splattered upon a manuscript by Richard Brautigan, who committed suicide during composition of a novel in 1984, as a critical component of late author's archive held at Bancroft Library in Berkeley, I will be focusing in this essay on Howe's archival research into material culture-for example, embroidery and silk shoes and wedding dress fragments assigned to female members of 18th century Edwards family-as evidence of what William Carlos Williams termed embodiment of knowledge.5 As with Codrescu's punning on relation of corpse and corpus in his analysis of human-stained Brautigan manuscript, Howe perceives archival research as a work of bereavement. In That This (2010), for example, a Howe work inaugurated by unexpected death in 2008 of her second husband, distinguished SUNY Buffalo philosopher of American pragmatism Peter Hare, she describes her researches in terms of mourning: If you looked through my papers until now, you would find a former dead husband at center. We had almost stopped needing to summon others-not quite. Not if you rely on written traces (15 That This). Like That This, Spontaneous Particulars addresses her gnostic disposition and serendipitous relation to archival researches as forms of trance-like summoning of dead that remain as textual spirits: Often by chance, via out-of-the way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular 'deep' text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at surface of visible, by mystic documentary telepathy. Quickly-precariously-coming as it does from an opposite direction (18). Archival research enables Howe, through luck or fate, to, as it were, read life backwards. She can an uncanny repetition of, not only a textual trace of past, but what she calls an experience [of] a moment before.In In American Grain, Williams reframed early American history through liberal quotations from source texts to convey their impact, in sound and sense, on modern scene. Howe, by contrast, focuses on writerly stylistics, but she also comments upon physical surface of texts. …

Ulysses Arrives in the United States: A Perspective from Eighty Years Ago

Ulysses Arrives in the United States:A Perspective from Eighty Years Ago Richard J. Gerber On 25 January 1934, Bennett Cerf’s Random House published the first one hundred copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses in order to secure its copyright in the United States. While the text of the first “authorized” American edition of Joyce’s novel was set using Samuel Roth’s pirated (and faulty) edition, this did little to dampen the anticipation and importance of this event. The publication history of Ulysses in America was filled with drama, intrigue, and legal proceedings for almost twelve years after it first appeared in Paris, but a clear sense of its emergence on the modern American literary scene may be discovered in the pages of what turned out to be the final issue of a little-known, eight-page, ten-cent, newspaper-style periodical that was published in North Carolina just twenty-one days after the Random House Ulysses made its debut.1 Contempo styled itself as “A Review of Books and Personalities,” offering “literary and social commentary.” It was initially published bi-monthly (and later every three weeks) but only for three years, between 1931 and 1934. It began as a college-dormitory newsletter, compiled by five students at the University of North Carolina, before it was moved to downtown Chapel Hill as an adjunct of the Intimate Bookshop. Though its duration was short, this journal distinguished itself among the best of the “Little Magazines” by showcasing the works of such authors as Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, D. H. Lawrence, and other notable literary figures of that era. At the beginning, Ezra Pound served as Contempo’s foreign editor, as he did for a number of other similar journals. In addition to the James Joyce issue, Contempo had previously published special editions (all during 1932) exclusively devoted to work and criticism by and about William Faulkner, Hart Crane, and George Bernard Shaw. Thus, while its impact may not have been fully recognized at the time, Contempo is now regarded as one of the earliest and most important torch-bearers for literary modernism in America. As the editors of Contempo began winding down their operation in late 1933, they asked Stuart Gilbert to serve as guest-editor for their final, special edition devoted to Joyce. He accepted the offer and started calling on a list of potential contributors, most of whom knew Joyce personally. He also secured permission to include a portion of [End Page 163] the first part of Joyce’s Work in Progress, which would not appear formally (in altered form) until five years later in 1939 as Finnegans Wake. While a table of contents was never part of Contempo’s format, the astonishing quality and quantity of the contributions to the mere eight pages of its James Joyce issue deserve the following descriptive index: CONTEMPO Volume III, Number 13 JAMES JOYCE ISSUE (Edited by Stuart Gilbert) 15 FEBRUARY 1934, Chapel Hill, North Carolina Contents: Page 1: James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” Part I (FW 7.20-10.23), continued on p. 4; Bennett Cerf’s “Publishing Ulysses,” continued on p. 2, comprising Cerf’s account of the censorship, trial, and publication of Ulysses in the United States; Stuart Gilbert’s “We’ll to the Woods No More,” including Gilbert’s expansion of a portion of his introduction to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Study, further clarifying Joyce’s acknowledged debt to Édouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupé as the source for Ulysses’s interior-monologue technique, and providing details about Joyce’s personal encounter with Dujardin.2 Page 2: Continuation and conclusion of Cerf’s “Publishing Ulysses; Modern Library advertisement for its editions of Joyce’s Dubliners (1926) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1928) and for the works of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neill, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Mansfield, John Dos Passos, and D. H. Lawrence. Page 3: Richard Thoma’s “A Dream in Progress,” a discussion of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”; Samuel Beckett’s poem “Home Olga”—the first publication of Beckett’s acrostic poem based on Joyce’s...

I speak of the city: Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century

In this dazzling multidisciplinary tour of Mexico City, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo focuses on the period from 1880 to 1940, the decisive decades that shaped the city into what it is today. Through a kaleidoscope of expository forms, I Speak of the connects the realms of literature, architecture, music, popular language, art, and public health to investigate the city in a variety of contexts: as a living history textbook, as an expression of the state, as a modernist capital, as a laboratory, and even as language. Tenorio-Trillo's formal imagination allows the reader to revel in the free-flowing richness of his narratives, opening startling new vistas onto the urban experience. From art to city planning, from epidemiology to poetry, this book challenges the conventional wisdom about both Mexico City and the turn-of-the-century world to which it belonged. And by engaging directly with the rise of modernism and the cultural experiences of such personalities as Hart Crane, Mina Loy, and Diego Rivera, I Speak of the will find an enthusiastic audience across the disciplines.

Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities

Research Article| April 01 2013 Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film, and literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Sex, or the Unbearable, a book he cowrote with Lauren Berlant, will be published by Duke University Press in 2014. This essay is excerpted from his latest book project, Bad Education: Why Queerness is No Good. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2013) 3 (1): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.3.1.0099 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities. History of the Present 1 April 2013; 3 (1): 99–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.3.1.0099 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2013 University of Illinois Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Hart Crane in Mexico: The End of a New World Poetics

While critics usually read Hart Crane in national terms as a U.S. poet, this essay looks at Crane transnationally, focusing on the time he spent in Mexico shortly before his death, in order to suggest that Crane's personal interactions with Mexican culture and Mexicans of indigenous descent destabilized his visionary poetics.

Black Suns of Melancholy Hart Crane’s Treatment of the Sun Motif in the Light of Mircea Eliade’s Study of Solar Cults

The aim of the article is to examine Hart Crane’s use of solar imagery in the light of Mircea Eliade’s study of solar cults. The Crane poem under consideration is his elegy for Harry Crosby, a publisher, fellow poet and friend, who was a sun devotee and one of the most flamboyant figures on the 1920s American literary scene. The work by Eliade on which the article draws is his seminal book Patterns in Comparative Religion. Filtered through the insights provided by the Romanian-born scholar, Crane’s elegy, all too often dismissed as a minor poem, takes on new meanings. In the light of Eliade’s illuminating analysis of solar symbolism and the role the sun plays in different cultures, the poem emerges as a carefully constructed reflection on the artist’s fate. The article demonstrates that Crane’s use of seemingly familiar solar imagery may in fact serve to highlight the need for inspiration, the pursuit of perfection and completeness or the yearning for artistic immortality - issues inscribed into a neo romantic view of the artist’s condition.

Landscape with Peregrine Falcon and Hart Crane

Landscape with Peregrine Falcon and Hart Crane

Hysterical Virgins and Little Magazines:

ABSTRACT The decisions Marianne Moore made when editor at The Dial magazine between 1925 and 1929 are often interpreted as evidence of a fussy or even “hysterical” antipathy to obscenity. This article questions the gendered assumptions embedded in the critical history of Moore's editorial role at The Dial by comparing her encounters with Hart Crane and James Joyce to the less well-known cases of Mary Butts, and D. H. Lawrence. It argues that the “downstream work” of editors needs to be recovered and understood in relation to the material constraints of periodical publication.

The Collective by Don Lee

Peter Stephan Jungk The Perfect American Michael Hofmann, tr. Other Press This engaging fictionalized biography of Walt Disney recounts Austrian cartoonist Wilhelm Dantine’s obsession to tarnish the reputation of the man who fired him. A darker look at the iconic Disney persona, Peter Stephan Jungk fixes a unique gaze upon a man who was very much as haunted as he was famous. W. Nick Hill And We’d Understand Crows Laughing: Poems (1997–2010) Dos Madres Press Often intimate and scaling a wide range of emotions and settings, this compilation of poetry serves as a distinct picture of the natural world. W. Nick Hill encapsulates time and place through descriptive imagery and surprising candor. “And we’d understand crows laughing, / live safe in the embrace of elements, / grateful to the seed for guidance.” Nota Bene is located in Sarajevo, the narrator’s hometown, and Drvenik, a Croatian village on the Adriatic where the narrator spends his formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. The stories, on the other hand, are set all over the world and the former Yugoslavia, after Bosnian refugees escaped from the war in the 1990s in an attempt to start a new life. Unlike the novella, the stories are not unified by the narrator; instead, their subject and somewhat typified characters—disillusioned, unadjusted, and heartbroken exiles— bring the stories together. “When I Was Born” is, actually , arranged as a series of twentyone vignettes, the most memorable moments of narrator Miljenko’s childhood that recall the bildungsroman , and whose great humor and skewed logic stem from the narrator ’s age. In all of the vignettes but the last, which gives the book its title, the narrator’s viewpoint is of a precocious, observant child who not only successfully navigates his parents’ complicated relationship, unusual living arrangements, colorful family members, and problems at school but also deeply comprehends life. Death, introduced in the first segment in which the narrator describes his birth, is both the novella’s recurring theme and the obsession of Miljenko’s childhood: “Relatively early on, when I was five or six, I came to the conclusion that everything connected with death sucked pretty bad and so decided to shelve my threats of dying, at least until I solved the problem of God’s existence.” The deaths of his grandfather , dog, and a young cousin—to name just a few—force the narrator to face his own mortality and, paradoxically, form his own identity. This mixture of a child’s perspective and language, as well as the fascination with death, makes “When I Was Born” a multilayered and complex text, which demonstrates why Jergović is one of the most prominent Croatian authors and one of the most translated European writers. Damjana Mraović-O’Hare Carson-Newman College Don Lee. The Collective. New York. W.W. Norton. 2012. isbn 9780393083217 Sylvia Plath did it with the oven door ajar. John Kennedy Toole did it with a garden hose. Hart Crane did it with the famous farewell, “Goodbye, everybody.” The suicides of these thirty-somethings exemplify the tragic tendency of young writers and artists to torture themselves in isolation and self-despair for the sake of their craft. Accordingly, this is what thirty-eight-year-old writer Joshua Yoon was supposed to do as an Asian, an orphan, and an artist. It was the only explanation for someone who “had no reason to do it, and yet he had every reason to do it.” In The Collective, the fourth novel by Korean American author Don Lee, the self-inflicted fate of Joshua Yoon is merely the placeholder for a bildungsroman about three artists who meet in the freshman dorms of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1988. The three friends later live in an artists ’ cooperative in Cambridge, Massachusetts , originally the home of Joshua Yoon’s deceased parents, and finally disperse along the U.S. coasts. The Asian Artists Collective, or 3AC,istheconstantfornarcissisticand may – june 2013 • 65 reviews passionate Moor, beautiful and intricate Jessica Tsai, and literary romantic Eric Cho—the novel’s contemporary Nick Carraway. Their bond strengthens amidst the bigotry of Macalester peers, disloyalty of transient relationships , and a national scandal none of...

Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957 ed. by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen (review)

Reviewed by: Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957 ed. by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen Spurgeon Thompson Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957, edited by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen, pp. 528. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2011. $50; $9.99 (e-book). Amid a flurry of new editions of Ernie O'Malley's key works, from a new edition of the canonical civil war memoir The Singing Flame (2012) published this year to his Raids and Rallies (2011) and The Men Will Talk to Me: Kerry Interviews (2012), this volume of his selected letters provides a crucial anchoring context. Very little of it has been published before. With the upcoming publication in 2013 of a new edition of O'Malley's best-known work, On Another Man's Wound, O'Malley has started to receive the attention he deserves. The volume presents a selection of letters from his most creative years as a writer, scholar, husband and father. Broken Landscapes also provides a substantive essay by Nicholas Allen, whose work in Modernism, Ireland, and Civil War is the most influential current framing of O'Malley's life and work; almost a hundred pages of detailed notes; eleven uncollected critical essays, chiefly about visual art, that O'Malley wrote for a range of venues; and a brilliant intervention by David Lloyd, "Afterword: On Republican Reading," that offers a critical-theoretical framework in which to understand O'Malley's contribution to Irish life and republicanism. It is now becoming apparent that O'Malley's massive body of work, much of which had [End Page 154] been left unpublished in attics and archives, constitutes a significant contribution to Irish modernism as well as subaltern modernism globally. Broken Landscapes marks a decisive moment in O'Malley's rediscovery, and in the visibility dissident Irish republicanism has recently achieved. O'Malley is valuable in this recovery of dissident republicanism for several reasons. As Lloyd puts it, "O'Malley inhabited the republican tradition more than he reflected upon it. In many ways, he embodied its principles." This volume allows us to fully understand what this embodiment might mean. "I don't mind being called a gunman," O'Malley writes in a very diplomatic letter to Desmond Ryan in a 1936. He continues, "we were, I suppose, though we didn't use that term ourselves. And you are a pacifist, and I respect you for your beliefs, I don't see why you shouldn't use the term." O'Malley was an Irish officer during the Anglo-Irish War, and later in the civil war in some eighteen Irish counties and areas of operation; he trained hundreds of volunteers and led several key raids. His afterlife as a writer who, having emigrated to America, found himself in artist colonies from Provincetown, Greenwich Village, Carmel, Taos, Sante Fe, Mexico City, to Woodstock and Yaddo, mixing with lights of the American and international cultural left like Hart Crane, Paul Strand, and Sergei Eisenstein is mapped out in this volume in some detail. "O'Malley's transition from activist to writer" as Allen notes, "has been a transition that many of his readers have found difficult to negotiate." Broken Landscapes thoroughly contextualizes this period of transition. In the absence a full biography of O'Malley (an abbreviated one was published fifteen years ago), this collection fills a scholarly need. We can, for example, now trace O'Malley's movements in America and Mexico in the crucial years he was drafting On Another Man's Wound. In the way that only diaries and letters can offer insights, we share a young man's awe at arriving in New York in 1928, standing in skyscrapers when before he hid in fields or sniped from within the Four Courts: "At about 3.30 the sirens in the harbour gave tongue and from the windows of the 11th floor we saw aeroplanes going down the river; then they reappeared on their way up. The top of the buildings . . . was soon crowded, as was every window. Papers and streamers rained down whilst the boats continued to siren. A silvery gray cigar body...

Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Sandy.

Mark Sandy, ed., Romantic Presences in Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2012) xi + 223 55.00 [pounds sterling] Mark Sandy offers in Romantic Presences in Twentieth Century a variety of essays that address still unfinished business of Romantic literary legacies. When W. B. Yeats declared in his poem Coole and Ballylee, 1931 that he and his associates had been the last romantics, he was mistaken, Yeats being undoubtedly a latter day Romantic, but by no means last. Other belated Romantics and Neo-Romantics had already arrived in his train, and more kept arriving after him, in a series still without visible terminus. Since time of Frank Kermode's Romantic Image and John Bayley's The Romantic Survival (both 1957), study of Romantic influences and mutations has repeatedly enhanced understanding of 20th century literature. Following up such recent works in this field as Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns (2010) and Michael O'Neill's The All-Sustaining Air (2007), Mark Sandy gathers here thirteen essays, several of them written by his Durham University colleagues, including Michael O'Neill himself, who contributes an assured and absorbing study of Hart Crane's uses of Romantic inheritance. The volume at times takes on air of a premature Festschrift for O'Neill, although it has no such formal standing. A miscellany of this kind cannot be expected to cover its topic with any sustained consistency, and Romantic Presences is no exception. One of essays, by Stephen J. Burn, even goes beyond 20th century into post-2001 fiction of Lynne Tillman and Don DeLillo. Among more important 20th century authors shaped by Romantic inheritance, neither Wallace Stevens nor D. H. Lawrence nor Allen Ginsberg is discussed at any length; while at Romantic end of relationship Burns, De Quincey, Scott, Mary Shelley, Poe, and Hazlitt are almost invisible, making way for Emerson and English poets, especially Words worth. The Romanticisms and Neo-Romanticisms of continental Europe are hardly considered, although name of Holderlin does appear in an essay by Michael Mack on Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan. Irish writers, on other hand, are better served here. Madeleine Callaghan provides a concise yet carefully detailed account of some ways in which Yeats absorbs and synthesizes phrases or images derived from English Romantic poets. Another valuable piece is Edward Larrissy's essay on Wordsworthian formation of Seamus Heaney's early work, an investigation that perceptively reveals a political distrust of sublimity emerging from poet's unfair seed-time. In seeking to confirm indebtedness of various modern writers to Romantics, several of contributors to this volume may be said to be pushing at open doors, although each adds new details to what were hardly unacknowledged legacies: Yeats and Crane were confessed admirers of their Romantic precursors, just as Heaney has readily acknowledged Wordsworth's inspiration, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--the subject of mark Sandy's essay here--proclaimed his devotion to Keats. Other contributions that explore such overt obligations include Nicholas Roe's account of Virginia Woolf's response to Leigh Hunt; Paige Tovey's demonstration that Gary Snyder's poetics of open-form verse derive from Romantic principles of organic form; and Sarah Wootton's more substantial exploration of Michael Ondaatje's modern Byronism, which reveals further dimensions beyond that author's often noted fascination with accursed outsiders. For most part, these essayists explore works of 20th century writers who can already be considered friendly to Romantic inheritance. …

Hart Crane's poetry: "Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio"

In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, comparing - misspelling and all - the great French poet's cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet's work in decades. Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane's epic Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work - from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy - revealing Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended. Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane's notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane's poems in White Buildings and his last poem, The Broken Tower, through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in Bridge. Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane's poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

In the Drink

In the Drink

3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat”

3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat” Anthony Channell Hilfer The bottom of the sea is cruel. —Hart Crane, “Voyages” As many critics have argued, questions of perspective and epistemology are central to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (Kent; Hutchinson). The story’s first sentence famously clues us to this: “None of them knew the color of the sky” (68). But behind the uncertainties of perspective is a determinable ontology, a presence, or rather, I shall argue, a sort of presence, the existence of which implies a rectified aesthetic response. This response emerges, however, from negations, denials, and occultations: what is not seen, who is not there, and what does not happen.3 Here again, when we look at nature we behold things that are not there and miss “the nothing that is.” Fully as much as Stevens in “The Snow Man,” Crane is concerned with certain conventions of representation: personification, the picturesque, the American sublime, and the melodramatic, which although it does not inform “The Snow Man” is played on in Stevens’s “The American Sublime.” Crane’s story is intertextual with nature poetry, sentimental poetry, hymns, and landscape art, as well as with Darwinism, theological clichés, and, less obviously, theological actualities. For the most part these conventions add up to what the Stevens poem declares is “not there.” To get to “the nothing that is” we must first traverse this ocean of error. Doing so helps keep our perspective not on the men in the boat but on the “real” (with the scare quotes actually meant to be scary) ocean. If the story is at least as much about Nature as about men in nature, if nature is a central character in the story, then one of the story’s central questions is how to see nature from a natural rather than human perspective. In a passage in section 1 of “The Open Boat” the sea is depicted in an orgy of hyperbolic personifications: A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut out all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. (69) Nature here has malign intent, being “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.” Nature has more agency, and an [End Page 248] agency more primary, than that of the men in the boat, who are merely in a reactive relation to the waves. In the final section of the story the correspondent is shown in an ironically passive relation to his own survival: Then the correspondent performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics and a true miracle of the sea. An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man. (91) As J. C. Levenson precisely observes, “Though the correspondent may be said ambiguously to have performed his little marvel, the wave and not the man has controlled the event” (lxv). In the men’s apprehension the waves are making an “effort” to kill them, threateningly “snarling” at them, the water “grim” in its resolve (69). Yet the heightened emotions attributed to Nature are rhetorically offset by the understated, calculatedly stilted, legalistic language of “a singular disadvantage” and “do something effective in the way of.” Crane is squaring the circle, on the one hand showing Nature as an effective presence and agency and on the other mocking the all-too-human tendency to personify nature...