Hart Crane and America

The blog format doesn't allow for the sort of carefully considered reflection necessary to make sense of a poet like Hart Crane. Blogs are too immediate, while Crane requires so much more time and effort. But the exigencies of this project demand a written response -- and soon.

The most obvious aspect of Crane's work is its dense symbolism, heavy with suggestive adjectives, made of rapid shifts in metaphors. Crane poetic technique was completely at odds with someone like William Carlos Williams in terms of how much poetic work each line is expected to do. Crane's poetry is laden with allusive layers of potential meaning, which sometimes has the effect of paralyzing the reader who doesn't know what to make of it all. I often find myself in that position. This density is complicated by the presence of an Elizabethan style of diction.

Despite their stylistic differences, it's interesting to note that Crane and Williams were both involved in projects that attempt to represent America, or at least construct an understanding of what America might be. Crane's "The Bridge" uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol through which the history and future of American might be understood. American figures and landscapes are brought into productive contact in an impressionistic weaving.

Crane makes a strong statement about the America he fashions by selecting a bridge as his symbol; it is a human-made product of the machine age. At times he disparages the "din" of modern capitalism (e.g. "Tintex - Japalac - Certain-teed Overalls ads"), but at other times he recognizes the depths to which the technology and the detritus of contemporary life are integrated into our lives.

"The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas
Loped under wires that span the mountain stream.
Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision
Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream."

This section of "The River" suggests that the spirit of the passing bear is picked up by the telephone wires stretching across the country. The "river" throughout this section seems to be exemplified more by telephone wires and railroad tracks than by natural rivers. But he is far from extolling the virtues of modernity. He views railroads, for example, from the hobo's perspective, those who simply make due in the circumstances they've been given. They inhabit a space in the modern world, but on the fringes, and they are still in contact with the natural world that attempts to persist.

"Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.
From pole to pole across the hills, the states
-They know a body under the wide rain;
Youngsters with eyes like fjords"

Not always covered with a roof over their heads, they come into physical contact with a "wide" rain which cannot be escaped as it is by other modern people who only need to run from their cars to their homes.

"Atlantis," the final section of the poem, layers meaning upon meaning as it interprets the cables that help support the bridge. Another modern image, the bridge cables become strings that play the music of America, threads that weave into the fabric of America. By the end, they become "orphic strings" with the potential to release us all, closing the poem on a powerfully optimistic note.