The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body

Studies in Major Literary Authors

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

Studies in Major Literary Authors William E. Cain, General Editor Whitman’s Ecstatic Union Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass Michael Sowder

Writing “Out of All the Camps” J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement Laura Wright

Ready to Trample on All Human Law Financial Capitalism in the Fiction of Charles Dickens Paul A. Jarvie

Here and Now The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf Youngjoo Son

Pynchon and History Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon Shawn Smith

“Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day” Philip Larkin and the Plain Style Tijana Stojković

A Singing Contest Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Meg Tyler Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst Reneé Somers Queer Impressions Henry James’s Art of Fiction Elaine Pigeon “No Image There and the Gaze Remains” The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham Catherine Sona Karagueuzian “Somewhat on the Community-System” Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne Andrew Loman Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys Carol Dell’Amico Melville’s Monumental Imagination Ian S. Maloney

Queer Times Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity Jamie M. Carr Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception” Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels Paul J. Ohler The End of Learning Milton and Education Thomas Festa Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads Scott Rode Creating Yoknapatawpha Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction Owen Robinson No Place for Home Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy Jay Ellis The Machine that Sings Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body Gordon A. Tapper

The Machine that Sings Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body

Gordon A. Tapper

Routledge New York & London

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑96591‑8 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑96591‑0 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Tapper, Gordon A. The machine that sings : modernism, Hart Crane, and the culture of the body / Gordon A. Tapper. p. cm. ‑‑ (Studies in major literary authors) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑96591‑8 (alk. paper) 1. Crane, Hart, 1899‑1932‑‑Criticism and interpretation. 2. Modernism (Literature)‑‑United States. 3. Erotic poetry, American‑‑History and criticism. 4. Body, Human, in literature. I. Title. PS3505.R272Z793 2006 811’.52‑‑dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

2006019778

For my parents, Milton and Sharon Tapper

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Recuperating the Animality of the Body

1

Chapter One Eroticism Pure and Impure: Deciphering the Body in “Possessions,” “Voyages,” and “The Wine Menagerie”

13

Chapter Two Morton Minsky Reads The Bridge: “National Winter Garden” and the Meaning of Burlesque

69

Chapter Three The Invented Indian of The Bridge: Hart Crane and the Ethnographic Idea of Culture

101

Chapter Four The Animal in the Machine: The Technological Sublime and Corporeal Figuration in The Bridge

149

Notes

183

Works Cited

203

Index

213

vii

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank the many people who have helped make this book possible. I am indebted first of all to Ann Douglas, my dissertation advisor at Columbia University’s Department of English, whose passion for the study of American culture helped drive this project to completion. To Robert A. Ferguson and Jonathan Levin, the other members of my dissertation committee, I am equally grateful for their indispensable critical feedback. To Peter Balakian, who initiated me into the world of American poetry, I owe a great deal. At an early stage of my intellectual development, he provided me with a model of a humane writer and teacher that continues to sustain me. Early forms of the manuscript were presented at the Americanist Dissertation Seminar at Columbia University, and I thank all of its members for their helpful critiques. I must also thank the many friends and colleagues who have provided me with intellectual and emotional sustenance during the gestation of this book: Meryl Altman, Gregg Baker, Clare Churchouse, Samuel R. Delany, Kaytie Johnson, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, David Kallick, Daniel Manheim, Maurice Manning, Sabine Russ, Karin Sander, Michael Sinowitz, Silvia Taccani, Gregory Volk, and Holly Zausner. Special thanks to Tan Lin for his friendship, his acute critical intelligence, and his seemingly inexhaustible creative energy. I have also been blessed with the love and support of my family: Douglas and Elena Tapper, Lynne Tapper Feinberg and Donald Feinberg, and especially my parents, Milton and Sharon Tapper. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the English Department of LaGuardia Community College, the City University of New York, with special thanks to Sandra Sellers Hanson, Department Chair, for all her support; to Karlyn Koh and Ting Man Tsao for reading portions of this manuscript; to Thomas Fink for our ongoing dialogue about contemporary poetry; and to Phyllis Van Slyck for all her guidance and friendship as a faculty mentor. ix

x

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book were supported by a Columbia University President’s Fellowship, faculty development released time generously provided by the City University of New York, and summer research grants from DePauw University. For his support, I thank Wayne Glausser, English Department Chair at DePauw University. “Legend,” “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” “Repose of Rivers,” “Possessions,” “Lachrymae Christi,” “Passage,” “The Wine Menagerie,” “Recitative,” “Voyages I,” “Voyages II,” “Voyages III,” “Voyages IV,” “Voyages V,” “Voyages VI,” “The Bridge,” “To Emily Dickinson,” “The Broken Tower,” from Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Quotations from the book O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber, copyright © 1997 by Four Walls Eight Windows, appears by permission of the publisher, Four Walls Eight Windows, a division of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. An early version of chapter two appeared as “Morton Minsky Reads The Bridge: Hart Crane and the Meaning of Burlesque” in Arizona Quarterly 56 (2000): 83-117, reprinted here by permission of the Arizona Board of Regents. Quotations from Hart Crane’s manuscripts are courtesy of the Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Introduction

Recuperating the Animality of the Body

Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty. —Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love

On the evening of December 10, 1922, Hart Crane was dazzled by Isadora Duncan, who was performing in Cleveland on what would prove to be her final American tour. By this time, Duncan was an international icon of high culture and, in some ways, already an anachronism. She had established her reputation as a “Barefoot Classic Dancer” in Europe during the first decade of the century, when she shocked audiences by appearing on stage in bare feet and physically revealing tunics; her choreography was equally shocking, for it broke radically with the techniques of ballet by creating the illusion of “natural” ambulatory movement (Daly 59). On an earlier American tour in 1916, the expatriate dancer had caused a stir in New York by baring her breast during a performance of the Marseillaise at the Metropolitan Opera House, a gesture that evoked the monumental, bare-breasted female figure in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Lady Liberty Leading the People. Yet this breach of corporeal decorum had not prevented the audience from rewarding Duncan with wild applause for championing the French cause, which at this moment resonated strongly with a surge of American patriotism and a growing national sentiment for the country to fight alongside the Allies in World War I. This embrace of Duncan as the incarnation of Lady Liberty would turn remarkably cold, however, when she returned to the United States in 1922. Things went badly from the moment she arrived at Ellis Island, where she was detained along with her new husband, the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, and interrogated because of her support for the new communist regime in Moscow. In this politically charged atmosphere, fueled by the 1919–1920 Red Scare and a rising tide of nativism, the uninhibited physicality of Duncan’s dances once again became a target for moral crusaders. The mayor of Boston 1

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condemned her dancing as obscene; she was denounced in Washington as a “Bolshevik hussy”; and in Indianapolis she was labeled a “nude dancer” who would corrupt public morals (Daly 201–202). It was in this context of ideological conflict that Crane saw Duncan’s program choreographed to the music of Tchaikovsky. Crane was struck by what he termed Duncan’s “plastique grace” and “intensity of posture” (114), but he was also outraged by the audience’s hostility.1 In a characteristically high-spirited letter, Crane praises Duncan’s performance as “glorious beyond words,” likening it to “a wave of life, a flaming gale that passed over” (114) the uncomprehending audience. The most revealing part of his letter, however, is his portrayal of Duncan at odds with the audience: When it was all over she came to the fore-stage again in the little red dress that had so shocked Boston, as she stated, and among other things told the people to go home and take from the bookshelf the works of Walt Whitman, and turn to the section called “Calamus.” Ninety-nine percent of them had never heard of Whitman, of course, but that was part of the beauty of the gesture. Glorious to see her there with her right breast and nipple quite exposed, telling the audience that the truth was not pretty, that it was really indecent, and telling them (boobs!) about Beethoven, Tschaikowsky, and Scriabin. (114–15)

On one level, Crane’s enthusiasm for Duncan echoes the reactions of the Greenwich Village radicals during the 1910s, who perceived her dancing as a symbol of artistic and social freedom and therefore embraced Duncan as a coconspirator in their quarrel with the genteel tradition. For Crane, however, there was something especially poignant about Duncan’s invocation of Whitman’s “Calamus” poems to validate the public display of her body, since by the 1920s these erotic poems had already come to signify homosexual desire to an emerging gay subculture (Chauncey 104–5). After being introduced to the bohemian life and gay communities of New York and Washington, D.C., Crane was exasperated, as he puts it in a letter, by the “American restrictions” that he encountered back in his native Ohio, where “one cannot whisper a word” (127) about homosexuality. As a result, Duncan’s defiant celebration of the unencumbered body was particularly meaningful for Crane because his perspective as a gay man sensitized him to social constraints imposed upon the body and, more specifically, to normative definitions of sexuality. Crane’s responsiveness to Duncan is not, however, simply a measure of how his homosexuality mediates his understanding of the body’s role within

Introduction

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culture. This paradigmatic scene also points beyond sexuality to the complex layering of tensions that help define modernism—tensions between artists and audiences, high and low, the elite and the popular, beauty and ugliness, repression and recovery, human and animal. Crane’s indignation demonstrates that he identifies with Duncan as the cosmopolitan artist, the agent of high culture in confrontation with a philistine bourgeois public. Curiously, this notion of culture encompasses not only dance, music, and literature, but also the “truth” of the human body. In other words, Crane looks down upon bourgeois Americans as “boobs” (an intentional pun on Duncan’s breast?) not only because of their ignorance of Scriabin and Whitman, but also because they have repressed the demands and pleasures of the flesh. Duncan’s exposed nipple represents the hidden truth of their bodies, but this is a difficult truth, hard to assimilate because it contravenes conventional standards of beauty and morality, and in this way it serves as a synecdoche for modern art. Not surprisingly for a dancer, the human body itself comes to stand for this new aesthetic because, in the words of Martha Graham—another progenitor of modern dance who would build on Duncan’s example—“bodies never lie” (qtd. in A. Douglas 51). Although Duncan is more a figure of the Progressive Era than the Jazz Age, her dancing’s outspoken physicality helped lay the groundwork for the “terrible honesty” that Ann Douglas argues is fundamental to the aesthetic ethos of American modernism as it unfolded during the 1920s.2 In Crane’s rendering of Duncan, the body becomes a contradictory emblem of authenticity, conflating the low, “indecent” qualities of the transgressive body with the products of high culture. It is essential, however, to differentiate Duncan’s construction of the dancing body from the role of the body in Crane’s poetry. Throughout her career, Duncan went to great lengths to position her dancing as a form of high culture. In part, she was reacting to the prevailing image of the dancer at the turn of the century—whether ballerina, skirt dancer, or chorus girl—as, in Ann Daly’s words, “a highly paid, empty-headed, blonde soubrette of ill repute” (157). As Daly argues, Duncan sought to “gain cultural legitimacy for dancing” by elevating it “from low to high, from sexual to spiritual, from black to white, from profane to sacred, from woman to goddess, from entertainment to ‘Art’” (16–17). Duncan pursued this strategy—and to a great extent succeeded—through a variety of means. Early in her career, she linked her dancing to the moral authority of classical Greece by performing in Greek-style tunics and modeling her movements on images from Greek vases and sculpture, which contextualized her bare legs and uncorseted breasts as signs of classical nudity (Daly 109). Moreover, she always performed in legitimate theaters, opera houses, or concert

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halls, usually to educated, upper-middle class audiences, deliberately avoiding vaudeville theaters or music halls, the more customary venues for dance (Daly 62–3). Later in her career, Duncan also exploited racial divisions in her quest for legitimacy, lashing out at jazz and the popular dance crazes of the 1910s and 1920s, which she denigrated as “the sensual convulsion of the negro.” She considered it “monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America,” since to her this music expressed “the primitive savage,” and she looked askance at “the tottering, ape-like convulsions of the Charleston” (Duncan 244). Jazz represented the next wave of modernism, but Duncan resisted it because she considered it inimical to her racially coded, high culture aesthetic. In contrast, Crane was already riding this new wave months before seeing Duncan. In a letter to Allen Tate, for instance, he explained that he was trying to “invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words” (86), a feat he believed he had accomplished in the summer of 1922 by incorporating jazz rhythms into the second section of his poem “For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” Yet as jazz and performers like Josephine Baker drew increasing attention from such critics as Carl Van Vechten—who had once praised Duncan’s “vivid imaginative genius” (qtd. in Daly 196)—Duncan retreated behind the wall she erected between high culture and the popular arts. Duncan’s position thus appears to confirm Andreas Huyssen’s influential argument in After the Great Divide that “modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture” (vii). Building on the work of Peter Bürger, Huyssen identifies two strains of modernism: a predominant modernism based on the autonomy of art and opposition to mass culture, and the “historical avantgarde,” which sought “to overcome the art/life dichotomy” (8), in part by deliberately “contaminating” art and literature with elements of popular culture. However, in the years since the publication of After the Great Divide, much of the scholarship on modernism has remapped the relationship between popular culture and modernism and questioned Huyssen’s dichotomy, both by expanding the canon of modernism and by focusing attention on the multiplicity of aesthetic practices that fall within the rubric of modernism.3 As David Chinitz has demonstrated, even T. S. Eliot, probably the figure most frequently invoked to represent the elitism of “high modernism,” may be viewed as a “culturally elastic” writer who was “deeply ambivalent” (6) about popular culture. Like Eliot, Crane does not fit comfortably on either side of Huyssen’s “great divide.” By reading Crane’s poetry alongside a variety of social

Introduction

5

developments, my study contributes to the growing understanding of modernism’s complex relationship with popular culture, especially insofar as that relationship is played out in the representation of the human body. As I will show, Crane’s eccentric inflection of the modernist idiom is grounded in a corporeal poetics in which the body serves as the central trope of authenticity. Although these representations of the body are often veiled by riddling, catachrestic figures of speech that disrupt signification, I argue that Crane’s preoccupation with the body as a source of both anxiety and renewal places his writing at the center of an array of cultural discourses, including sexological theories that emphasize the animality of human eroticism; ethnographic efforts to document and salvage “primitive” cultures; the vogue for Native Americans as a symbol of American authenticity; the encoded language of an emerging urban gay culture; disputes over obscenity within both popular and high culture; and the rhetoric of the technological sublime. Both these social discourses and Crane’s corporeal poetics are informed by the sense that there is something problematic about the body. According to Tim Armstrong, modernity is accompanied by a variety of medical and technological changes that make the body a “locus of anxiety, even crisis” (4), in part because Darwinian theory provoked “fears of regression, destabilizing relations between self and world” (3). However, the modern concept of the body as a problem is often traced to the Enlightenment, in particular to the writings of René Descartes, which postulate a sharp distinction between the thinking self and the body that houses the self. In a famous passage from his Discourse on the Method, Descartes asserts that our bodies are less knowable to ourselves than our minds: I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this “me,” that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is. (101)

Conceived as a dematerialized entity, self is estranged from body, making the body the site of an apparently irreconcilable problem of identity. As Peter Brooks has observed, it is surely historically inaccurate and simplistic to blame Descartes alone for this bifurcation of mind and body. The modern “consciousness of division” has nonetheless had an indelible impact upon representations of the body since the Enlightenment, generating what Brooks

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describes as the pervasive “sense that the body can be recuperated to consciousness and language only by effort . . . Whatever it once was, the body is now problematic; and our sense that it was once less so may be a reflection of how much it now is” (5). Often preoccupied with just this kind of reclamation of the problematic body, Crane’s writing seeks to recover the body from the Cartesian paradigm in which self is estranged from body. This is why his poems are often marked by the quest for “new thresholds, new anatomies” (24), as he calls these imagined bodies in “The Wine Menagerie,” one of the poems that I examine in Chapter One along with “Possessions” and “Voyages,” two other texts of erotic crisis from his first book, White Buildings. For Crane, recovering the body entails a confrontation with animality, the physiological materiality of the body that appears to place it beyond such historically contingent constructs as gender and sexual deviance, normative formations about which Crane was especially aware given his point of view as a gay man. Of course, the very postulation of a body that exists prior to its cultural construction seems to be ruled out by Michel Foucault’s theorization of the body as “the surface of the inscription of events” (“Nietzsche” 356), a surface “totally imprinted by history” (“Nietzsche” 357). Foucault explicitly attacks as false the conventional belief that “the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology, and that it escapes the influence of history” (“Nietzsche” 360). Yet even Foucault advocates resistance to what he terms the “deployment of sexuality,” not by engaging in the critique of sexual repression so prevalent in the discourse of modernism, which he views as merely “a tactical shift” (Sexuality 131), but by creating “a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (Sexuality 159). Although he never fully develops this notion of “bodies and pleasures,” he questions whether “we truly need a true sex” (vii) in his introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite who was compelled by doctors to live as a man even though she had been raised as a woman. Empathizing with Barbin, Foucault declares that “one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures” (vii). Here Foucault himself acknowledges at least the potential of inhabiting what he calls “the happy limbo of non-identity” (xii) represented by Barbin, and he thus appears to express the desire to escape normative sexual categories. As Judith Butler has argued, by “seek[ing] recourse to a prediscursive multiplicity of bodily forces,” Foucault appears to identify a “source of resistance to history and to culture” (312), thus compromising one of the central premises of his theory of power. As I will show, Crane’s corporeal poetics are engaged in a complex dialogue with these competing views of the body as, on one hand, a surface

Introduction

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inscribed by history and, on the other, a source of renewal enabled by the recuperation of animality. Crane’s efforts to regain the animality of the body within his poetry did not, of course, take place in isolation from the social discourses that suffused this moment in the history of American modernism. As Ann Douglas has shown, a preoccupation with animals as tropes for the repressed corporeal truths of human nature surfaces in a wide range of cultural arenas during the 1920s, so much so that “going public with one’s animal nature became a popular pastime” (48). These activities include a craze for private menageries of exotic animals, which were kept by such celebrities as Robert Ripley, John Barrymore, and Josephine Baker, who famously appeared on stage in the company of her leopard Chiquita (52). Moreover, the vernacular dances that so repulsed Duncan became hugely popular, many of them bearing animal names, such as the Turkey Trot, the Fox Trot, and the Grizzly Bear. In addition to these animal dances, fast dances such as the Lindy Hop and the Charleston came into fashion alongside the dance marathon phenomenon. Douglas reads these popular fads as cultural manifestations of “terrible honesty,” an ethos which “dismissed the ideals of men” and was founded instead upon human “affinities with the world of the savages and the animals” (44). From Jack London’s call for “a savage investigation of biological fact” (qtd. in A. Douglas 54), to Marianne Moore’s animal poems, to Margaret Mead’s sympathetic 1928 portrayal of promiscuity in Coming of Age in Somoa, to Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The Hairy Ape—all of these, for Douglas, are evidence that “the writing of the urban 1920s is a gloss on the body and the workings of what Freud called ‘the primitive mind’” (44). The principal aim of this study is to establish the relationship between the rhetoric of Crane’s poetry and this widespread social preoccupation with the animality of the body. By embedding Crane’s texts within this network of discourses, I am drawing on Foucault’s notion of archaeology, but I make no attempt to identify a unified “discursive formation” in the strict sense in which Foucault employs this concept. I utilize instead a hybrid critical method that combines cultural history with formal poetic analysis. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault describes how the archaeologist of knowledge treats individual texts “not as autonomous nuclei . . . but as events and functional segments gradually coming together to form a system” (xvii). In my reading of Crane, I also avoid treating his texts as “autonomous nuclei.” In Chapter Three, for instance, I demonstrate how the discourse of ethnographic authenticity unites Crane’s representation of Native Americans in The Bridge with other, apparently dissimilar texts of his era, such as Black Elk Speaks and Argonauts of the Western Pacific. But in Foucault’s view, the statements of individual writers are less important than “that which systematizes”

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these statements “from the outset” (xix). However, rather than privileging the wider discursive system within which Crane wrote, I am equally concerned with the intricacies of Crane’s poetic rhetoric, building in particular on the work of Lee Edelman, who convincingly demonstrates that the figurative strategy of catachresis is at the heart of Crane’s poetics. Through this hybrid approach to Crane, I strive to uncover what Stephen Greenblatt terms “a set of interlocking tropes and similitudes that function not only as objects but as the conditions of representation” (86). The representation of the body in Crane’s poetry inevitably raises the question of how Crane’s homosexuality informs his writing. In the last fifteen years, the evasions and stigmatizations that had often marred discussions of this dimension of Crane’s life and poetry have receded from the secondary literature. More than any other book, Thomas E. Yingling’s Hart Crane and The Homosexual Text helped establish the extent to which Crane’s work may be viewed in terms of a specifically gay semiotic. In addition, the publication of a new edition of Crane’s letters, O My Land, My Friends, along with the recent biographies by Clive Fisher and Paul Mariani, have filled many of the gaps in knowledge about Crane’s participation in the gay subculture of his time. Although my study builds upon many of the premises of gay studies and queer theory, especially insofar as these are based on the Foucauldian view of homosexuality as an historical construction, it also strives to move beyond the goal of establishing the importance of homosexuality to Crane’s poetry, which has already been achieved through the work of Yingling, Robert K. Martin, Langdon Hammer, Samuel R. Delany, Tim Dean, and others.4 My book extends these investigations into the queer dimensions of Crane’s writing, in particular by recovering its links to the gay subculture surrounding theatrical burlesque during the 1920s, but I also address aspects of Crane’s eroticism that do not fit with Yingling’s overriding view that Crane was engaged in a critique of homophobia. Moreover, in Yingling’s effort to critique the bias against queer readings that distinguish some of the earlier New Critical studies of Crane, he overplays the extent to which Crane’s identities as poet and gay man are “flatly contradictory sites” (143), an issue I address at more length in Chapter One. In the four chapters which follow, I examine poems written across the span of Crane’s career, ranging from the early lyric “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” (first published in 1920) to “The Broken Tower,” composed in 1932 shortly before Crane’s suicide. Although much of the book treats various aspects of The Bridge, the long poem Crane worked on between 1923 and 1930, I do not offer a detailed, comprehensive reading of The Bridge as a whole. I concentrate instead on an intensive analysis of “National Winter

Introduction

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Garden,” “The Dance,” and “Cape Hatteras,” the sections of the poem in which the representation of the body is paramount. Because of this approach, some of the major sections of The Bridge (such as “Atlantis,” its finale) are addressed only insofar as they relate to issues raised by the readings of the sections I have selected to highlight. By focusing so exclusively on Crane’s depictions of the body, I hope to remedy the critical neglect of this important aspect of Crane’s poetic, which has only been touched on in other critical accounts of his work. Chapter One examines how Crane’s representation of the body in the grip of erotic experience is mediated by both the discourse of sexology and the discourse of poetic difficulty that Crane inherits from late Romanticism and Symbolism. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, I analyze Crane’s poetics of difficulty in terms of its relationship to the dialectical interplay between the concepts of purity and pollution. Just as ritual contact with the impure can effect purification, so the linguistic “impurities” of Crane’s rhetoric—including solecisms, neologisms, and catachrestic figures—generate an elliptical style that “purifies” Crane’s language of its ordinary discursive meaning. I examine how the dialectic between purity and pollution plays out in different ways in “Possessions,” “The Wine Menagerie,” and “Voyages,” the poems in White Buildings that represent Crane’s most explicit evocation of the eroticized body outside of The Bridge. I read these poems of erotic crisis in connection with Crane’s interest in the sexological theories of Remy de Gourmont, the French polymath revered by Eliot as “the perfect critic” and touted by Crane as “an adept scientist of the emotions,” “one of the most thorough students of physiology and psychology of the modern world” (82). Gourmont placed particular emphasis on the idea of animality in his notorious work Physique de l’amour, which Crane read in Ezra Pound’s 1922 translation. “Man is an animal,” insists Gourmont, “submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality” (Natural 4). Seeking to address the role of animality in Crane’s poetry more thoroughly than has previously been done, I analyze Crane’s bestiaries, arguing that these animals are tropes for the dangerous and exhilarating powers of the body that Crane seeks to recover. In Chapter Two, I propose a revisionary reading of “National Winter Garden,” the largely overlooked section of The Bridge in which Crane represents the eroticized human body more directly than in any other part of his long poem. Even when this episode receives critical attention, its depiction of a burlesque performance is usually viewed as a vulgar form of popular entertainment that signals cultural degeneration. I argue, however, that the poem needs to be read in the context of the debates about popular culture

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The Machine that Sings

and obscenity that were provoked by burlesque when it turned to increasingly explicit displays of women’s bodies during the 1920s. Drawn to these spectacles because of their transgressive sexuality, Crane recasts them as urban purification rituals in which the human body becomes a paradoxical nexus of low humor and transcendent catharsis. In addition to documenting Crane’s enthusiasm for burlesque, I address the links between burlesque and the gay subculture of the era, and I investigate burlesque as a cultural phenomenon, in part by examining the memoir of Morton Minsky, the prominent impresario whose National Winter Garden theater is the setting of the poem. The exposition of this section of The Bridge hinges on recognizing that Crane caught burlesque right on the cusp of its transformation from a hybrid theatrical genre of the nineteenth century into the forerunner of the pornographic genre familiar to us today. Keeping this cultural context in mind, I examine Crane’s appropriation of such elements of burlesque as the striptease; its multiple entrances and exits; its double entendres; its tinted spotlights; and one of its sexual props, the trapeze. In my third chapter, I argue that Crane’s appropriation of Native American motifs overlaps with the ethnographic discourse of the 1920s, a crucial period in the history of anthropology that has been termed “the defining moment of the fieldworker archetype” (Stocking, “Ethnographic Sensibility” 210). Like many writers of the era, Crane viewed Native Americans as a “vanishing” people that symbolize an endangered authenticity, a condition that Crane figures as the vigorous physicality of the Indian body. Situating Crane amid the vogue for the primitive—including English translations of Indian oral texts and the ethnographic quest to inhabit the “native point of view”—I focus on a detailed reading of “The Dance,” the section of The Bridge in which Crane stages a fantasized journey back to the pre-Columbian world of the Indians, there to witness the ritual sacrifice of a Native American “Sachem.” The Indian observed in “The Dance” is on one level a successor to such nineteenth-century confections as Cooper’s “Last Mohican” and Longfellow’s doomed “Hiawatha.” I argue, however, that Crane’s primitivism blends an idealizing universalism with a skeptical relativism; that “The Dance” both perpetuates and contradicts the parallel myths of primitive and homosexual promiscuity; and that the poem views the primitive as a projective fantasy, a product of subjectivity itself. Accordingly, I analyze how Crane effects an identification with the Native American object of desire via manipulations of point of view, a literary device that echoes the newly ascendant ethnographic methodology of “participant observation.” In the final chapter, I focus on Crane’s efforts to invest technology with what he calls the “unconscious nervous response of our bodies” (CPS 223).

Introduction

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Just as William Carlos Williams once described a poem as “a machine made of words” (qtd. in Tichi 267), Crane was drawn to technological and architectural tropes for poetry, viewing his poems as “white buildings” and language itself as a force that “has built towers and bridges” (CPS 223). In this chapter, I analyze the series of fantastic bodies—human, animal, mechanical—through which the “Cape Hatteras” section of The Bridge proceeds as Crane takes measure of the impact of technology upon the human sensorium. I pay particular attention to the animal tropes Crane employs in his celebrated depiction of a “gigantic power house,” which I consider in connection with the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant outside of Detroit. The largest factory in the world when it was built during the mid1920s, River Rouge quickly became an icon of modernity, both as promise and threat, and it served as the subject of important works by such visual artists as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth during the very same years that Crane composed “Cape Hatteras.” Arguing that Crane’s technological figures for the body are uneasily balanced between utopian fantasies of bodily perfection and nightmare visions of physical annihilation, I situate Crane’s version of the technological sublime within the larger modernist determination to link writing with the energies and limitations of the human body.

Chapter One

Eroticism Pure and Impure: Deciphering the Body in “Possessions,” “Voyages,” and “The Wine Menagerie”

There is hardly any pollution which does not have some primary physiological reference. As life is in the body it cannot be rejected outright. And as life must be affirmed, the most complete philosophies, as William James put it, must find some ultimate way of affirming that which has been rejected. —Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

THE SOUND OF PURITY The allure of purity is unmistakable in Hart Crane’s poetry. Over and over again the poems imagine purity as the object of desire through an immense variety of figures. It is there in the “white falling flakes” (3) that descend upon the kissing speaker of “Legend”; it is alluded to by the “immaculate venom” that “galvanizes” (19) the eyes of the poet in “Lachrymae Christi”; and it is present in the wish to fashion what Crane calls in The Bridge an “unfractioned idiom” (44). In “The Broken Tower,” the last poem he wrote before his 1932 suicide, Crane invokes purity with unusual explicitness. Turning to emblems of the body, Crane resolves a crisis of potency—poetic, erotic, spiritual—by announcing that he is “healed, original now, and pure”: My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored Of that tribunal monarch of the air Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word In wounds pledged once to hope,—cleft to despair? The steep encroachments of my blood left me No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower

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The Machine that Sings As flings the question true?)—or is it she Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?— And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes My veins recall and add, revived and sure The angelus of wars my chest evokes: What I hold healed, original now, and pure . . . (160–1)

These stanzas view blood, and the vitality of the body for which it stands, through a double lens. At first, the body proves to be an insufficient standard by which to gauge the authenticity of poetic language, to answer whether poetry is “cognate.” Unlike the divine bodies of Zeus and Christ to which the poem alludes, our human bodies are subject to the “encroachments” of mortality. The poet is “revived,” however, by the presence of a feminine entity that suggests the anima within, and the rhythmic power of blood is equated with poetic language. “Counting the strokes” of this blood-poetry, the poet declares that his struggles (“The angelus of wars”) have made possible the cleansing now at hand. While the quest for purity is one of the great themes of romantic and modern poetry, Crane’s fixation with this ideal takes on a distinctive cast by the way in which he links it to the figuration of the human body in three poems he wrote between 1924 and 1926, the period during which his writing reached its most radical stylistic form. “Voyages,” “Possessions,” and “The Wine Menagerie” occupy a special place in Crane’s oeuvre because they couple the urge to purify with representations of the eroticized human body, bringing together purity, eroticism, and the body as in no other instances of his work. These odal poems also bring Crane to what is probably the climax of his career: the summer of 1926 in Cuba (on the Isle of Pines) during which he experienced an extraordinary creative breakthrough on The Bridge, progress on which had been stalled for some time. These months saw the drafting of ten of the fifteen sections that would comprise the long poem he had been contemplating since 1923.1 After coming to terms with how to approach the body in these poems of erotic crisis, Crane was in a better position to employ the body as a multivalent figure for erotic power, mechanical energy, and national identity in The Bridge. But first he faced the problem of representing the eroticized body in a manner that was consistent with his notions of poetic purity. Why the body is particularly apposite to the pursuit of purity is perhaps more an anthropological than a literary question, although the overlapping of these categories seems precisely the point in modernist poetic enterprises

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like Crane’s. In one of the best-known formulations that Crane himself offers of his poetics, it is impossible to mistake the conceptual centrality of purification, though in this case the appetite for purity bears no explicit corporeal reference point: It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward. (CPS 221)

The ideal of inviolable purity underlying this doctrine of authenticity is indicated by the singularity of Crane’s “new word,” a holism that inoculates the poem against the vitiations of multiplicity. The language of such a poetry would be radically original, unprecedented (“never before spoken”) and thus untainted by historical priority. It would be, in addition, incorruptible by ordinary usage (“impossible to actually enunciate”), and thus steadfastly antagonistic to paraphrase, throwing up semantic blockages that preserve its purity. But while difficulty preserves purity in this conception of poetry, it also guarantees that the poetry will lodge in the reader’s memory in a form that Crane thinks of as beyond language, as an “active principle” rather than as words “actually enunciate[d].” Written during the very same period in which these three poems of erotic crisis were composed, this sentence from Crane’s “General Aims and Theories” correlates his urge to purify with the fantasy that one may write a language of silence, a language that cannot be spoken.2 Crane’s postulation of a pure language of silence must be viewed, however, against his actual practice as a poet, since the importance of phonic patterns to his verse seems contrary to the erasure of sound implied by such an ideal. The prominence of sonic effects in Crane is exemplified by the mellifluous aural design that marks the opening lines of “Repose of Rivers”: The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. (16)

Our ears are soothed by recurring vowel sounds (ow and its near rhyme, ou); by interlacing l’s, w’s, m’s; by the way “a sarabande” nearly echoes, rhythmically and phonically, “a slow sound”; and by the series of soft final d’s (sarabande, wind, mowed, mead) that bring the couplet to its pillowy stop. Crane’s verse, often euphonious in just this manner, also exhibits its orientation to the ear with harsher music, when, for example, it renders the

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dynamos of modern technology in the “Cape Hatteras” section of The Bridge with booming, heavily accented, lengthening lines: Power’s script, wound, bobbin-bound, refined— Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars. (79)

Some of the same sounds that in “Repose of Rivers” evoke the “slow sound” of a mournful calm (variations on ow) are here enveloped by percussive alliteration and a profusion of doubled letters (bb, pp, oo, rr, ll, ss), underlining in their grotesque exaggeration the declaration a few lines earlier that “hearing’s leash is strummed” by the Machine as if by a demonic loomharp. In “Cape Hatteras,” the Machine “parts / Our hearing momentwise” (79) with the sublime intensity of its sound, but it is of course Crane’s own sonic inventiveness that conveys the discordant music of technology. Yet silence as a poetic ideal recurs over and over again as an analogue for purity. “Sweet, dead Silencer” (128) is his reverent epithet for Emily Dickinson, “visible wings of silence” his synaesthetic periphrasis for poetry in “The Broken Tower” (161). In a letter that intertwines his feelings about being in love with his ideal of poetic purity, Crane turns to another synaesthetic figure for a silent language, conflating sight, sound, and touch: “my eyes have been kissed with a speech that is beyond words entirely” (188). Reworking the cliché that love leaves one speechless into a highly compressed credo of poetic potency, Crane suggests through synaesthesia the unity of erotic transport and sublime language. “Beyond words entirely,” however, is not a place where any poet can truly go, and remain a poet. It is as if the optative language of silence is the essentialized spirit of the verse; the sensuous aurality, its body. We are not meant to choose one over the other, just as Crane does not. We are meant to savor the disorienting effect of a style based in patterns of sound but premised on a phenomenology of silence, of purity. Silence, purity, and whiteness appear with obsessive frequency throughout Crane’s poetry, but always against the backdrop of sound, degradation, darkness. Crane’s poetic credo may point to silence, but the poems themselves exemplify what Roland Barthes calls “writing aloud,” a hypothetical category of writing he admits “is not practiced.” If it were, however, the writing he envisions would seek the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the

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voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. (66–7)

Barthes’s ideal of pleasure-giving literary language turns on a metaphor, on speaking of language in terms of the body. Crane often aspires toward just such a “carnal stereophony”; when his subject is the sublimity of the eroticized human body, as it is in the three poems I examine here, he comes face to face with the contradictory demands of a poetics of silence and his conviction that authentic poetic language is incarnational, a language bearing the “signature of the incarnate word” (37), as he calls it in “Voyages IV.” The tension between purification and defilement reaches an apogee in “The Wine Menagerie,” “Possessions,” and “Voyages” precisely because they engage subject-matter that returns incarnational language to its figurative source, the body.3 Outside of the “National Winter Garden” section of The Bridge, which I examine in Chapter Two, these poems collectively represent Crane’s most direct evocation of the eroticized human body.4 In “Possessions,” an importunate voice confides the “sacrifice” of “the flesh” as it “assaults outright for bolts” (18) of erotic pleasure-pain; in “The Wine Menagerie,” a drinker observing men and women interacting in a bar hallucinates “bodies wreathing,” “new anatomies” (23–4), and, finally, the physical mutilation of three men (Holofernes, John the Baptist, and Petrushka) whose deaths typify the orphic archetype of the male poet undone by the sexual power of women. The pivotal moment of “Voyages” also centers upon the body: the speaker’s description of a sexual embrace with his lover’s “body rocking,” a scene of lovemaking in which the erogenous zones of the body are rendered in architectural terms as “black swollen gates,” “whirling pillars and lithe pediments” (36). All three poems suggest, with varying degrees of explicitness, that a condition of impurity is in need of correction. A purgative “white wind,” portending “pure possession,” “rase[s] / All but bright stones” (18) at the end of “Possessions.” In “The Wine Menagerie,” intoxication (alcoholic and erotic) “redeems the sight,” generates “new purities,” and “distills” the ability to lose oneself “within another’s will” (24). Of the three poems, “Voyages” pursues purity with the most absoluteness, opposing the impurities of the eroticized body to the purity of language. The body is metamorphosed in “Voyages III” by a “skilled transmemberment of song” (36), the sublimity of an “unbetrayable” poetic language with which “Voyages VI” (and the sequence as a whole) concludes: The imaged Word, it is, that holds Hushed willows anchored in its glow.

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The Machine that Sings It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know. (40)

The “imaged Word” is a purifying language that imposes order on experience by silencing it, by hushing willows with its own “accent,” its internal patterns of sounds and stresses, as this finely tuned quatrain itself is meant to exemplify. THE DIFFICULTY OF DEFILEMENT Midway through “The Wine Menagerie,” a vision of coupling bodies rises before the speaker: Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out, Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals: Between black tusks the roses shine! (24)

The confounding syntax of the first two lines leaves them open to contradictory paraphrases, but there is no mistaking the phantasm: degraded bodies marked, as if by language, with tokens of their disgrace. By representing these intertwined bodies as branded with a stigma, Crane appears to provide an image of the culturally constructed body, anticipating the Foucauldian notion of the human body as a surface inscribed by social discourse. Viewed in the context of the poem as a whole (with its allusions to the ecclesiastical architecture of “transepts” and “carillons,” the satanic serpent, the martyrdom of John the Baptist), it is clear that these lines point to the religious discourse of Christianity that stigmatizes Eros as original sin, a dangerous force that must be rigorously controlled. Stigma, however, is a term fraught with antithetical meaning, signifying both infamy and, in a typical Christian inversion of high and low, the sacredness of Christ’s bodily wounds. Crane calls upon this antithesis in order to suggest the purification to which both body and language are susceptible. In these lines the stigma of sex is called up only to be “repealed,” magically erased by the very eroticism that would seem to be its source. This stigma generating its own repeal is Crane’s emblem for the dialectic of purity and defilement that governs his figuration of the body and his ideal of poetic language. Reading these lines of “The Wine Menagerie” confronts us with a typical Cranean crux; unpacking it illuminates the relation between Crane’s poetics of difficulty and the compulsion to purify language. The words upon which an interpretation of the line must be based—“unwitting,”

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“stigma,” “repeals”—are all overdetermined. Compounding the difficulty is a deliberately induced confusion over what part of speech to assign “unwitting.” Word order suggests that it is a transitive verb, that the embracing bodies are “unwitting” the sexual stigma. Read this way, “unwitting” is meant to suggest the more customary “outwitting,” but also to recall the older sense of wit as reason, especially in the lexicon of some of Crane’s favorite Elizabethan writers. Unwitting the stigma drains it of power by refuting the logic upon which it is based. In other words, the transgression of eroticism somehow cancels sexual taboos. But if “unwitting” is read as a verb signifying the same action as “repeals,” the lines turn in on themselves in a circular grammar of redundancy: each turn of the bodies revokes the stigma revoked by the turning bodies.5 The alternative to this conundrum is to read “Unwitting the stigma” as an absolute construction, treating “unwitting” as an adjective meaning unintentional or ignorant. In this reading, the lines assert that human bodies coupled in an erotic embrace “repeal” cultural “laws,” taboos based not on reason but on the ignorance of fear, prejudice, and superstition. While this seems to solve the grammatical difficulties, the verbal form of “unwitting” remains implicated in the reader’s sense of the line. Crane wants it both ways, creating an enigmatic rhetorical gesture that resists a normative explication. Why, however, does Crane create these enigmas? Consider a similar confusion over parts of speech at the end of “Voyages IV”: In this expectant, still exclaim receive The secret oar and petals of all love. (37)

Here the possible grammars are dizzyingly complex. “Exclaim” may be read as a noun (equivalent to “exclamation”) modified by the two adjectives “expectant, still,” while “receive” may be read as the verb. But as Lee Edelman points out, “In this expectant” can also be read as a subordinate clause, “exclaim receive” as a compound predicate (156–7). In yet another reading, R. W. B. Lewis treats “still” as a noun (168). Teasing out these alternatives is a necessary component of reading Crane, but rather than coming to rest in a normative paraphrase, which would betray the spirit in which Crane creates these enigmas, it is more important to ask why these enigmas were created in the first place. “Something is obviously wrong,” according to Lewis, with the end of “Voyages IV.” With no supporting manuscript evidence, he resolves the crux by rewriting the lines: “I suppose ‘still’ to be the noun intended, and the comma to be misplaced, and read it: ‘In this expectant still, exclaim [and] receive,’ etc. (168).” That even such an attentive, reverent reader of

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Crane as Lewis would feel compelled to expunge Crane’s intentional solecisms demonstrates that even the sympathetic New Critical readings of Crane often overlooked the rhetorical function of Crane’s difficulty. Indeed, for his less sympathetic critics, such as Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and Yvor Winters, these difficulties were an index of his “failure.” These solecisms, however, need neither apology nor censure. Allen Grossman articulates a more fruitful perspective on poetic difficulty: The sense of Crane’s text (the response it anticipates) must lie in the acknowledgement of its authenticity. Such a response will be mediated by a theory of its “difficulty” which does not erase or neutralize the complexity and peril of the terms of presence at the extremity of demand. (245)

Grossman avoids taming the transgressive spirit behind Crane’s linguistic aberrations by identifying an intrinsic connection between these opaque passages and the quest for purity: “Stylistic solecism (language out of place) is the literary equivalent of defilement (the ritual consequence of the transgression of boundaries), as philosophical idealism is its conceptual equivalent” (242). Although Crane’s objective is the purity of the “single, new word . . . impossible to actually enunciate,” his means is the “multitudinous Verb” (as he calls it in “Atlantis”), a style studded with impurities—neologisms, archaisms, solecisms, and, perhaps above all, an enduring proclivity for “mixed metaphor,” or, to use the Greek rhetorical term for “misuse,” catachresis, the figure of speech Lee Edelman calls Crane’s “master trope” (10). Edelman holds that through the “misuse or straining of language, catachresis suggests a revitalizing ‘error’ that creates a new ground for poetic meaning” (67). This figure enables Crane to extend meaning through the radical mixing of metaphors and through the improper naming of objects or actions that lack proper names of their own. In catachresis Crane finds a trope that allows for the originality, the poetic extension or bridging that his revisionary rhetoric demands. (7–8)

Whatever form obscurity takes in Crane—catachresis, grammatical irregularity, coinage—it needs to be viewed as one of his means of seeking purity, though via the paradoxical route of linguistic defilement.6 The object carrying the taint of pollution in these poems is the human body, veiled as it may be behind Crane’s riddling language. But there is the additional sense that language itself is in decay, that body and language, echoing each other in their defilement, are equally in need of cleansing. Usually thought of as a panegyrical poet, Crane complains, like so many writers of

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the post-war era, that along with values, language itself has been worn out by modernity: It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today . . . there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction. (CPS 218)

Crane’s belief that it had become, at his particular historical moment, especially difficult to write poems that “ring with . . . spiritual conviction” coincides with the governing premise of that vein of modern poetry in step with Mallarmé’s famous injunction “to purify the language of the tribe” (71).7 Purification was imperative because, in the words of George Steiner, “language as a whole . . . was being cheapened, brutalized, emptied of numinous and exact force, by mass usage” (42). Under the pressure of this drive for purity, opacity becomes intrinsic to the poetic enterprise, and by resorting to what Steiner terms “ontological difficulty,” such poets “express their sense of the inauthentic situation of man in an environment of eroded speech” (44). But Crane’s attachment to purity is also grounded in the particular course of modern poetry in the United States. In his elucidation of “language purification in American poetry,” Geoffrey Hartman writes of the impasse that came with the Spring Cleaning that [William Carlos] Williams undertook in Spring and All and other works of language purification. The impasse was not unproductive: it patterned an American type of sublimity. Since then we have not tired of hearing about the American Sublime; its capaciousness, spaciousness, greatness, newness; its readiness to take on experience and remain sublime. (Criticism 119)

Crane and Williams are both sublime purifiers, participating in what Hartman calls American poetry’s quest “to break with Anglophile burdens in the 1920s” (117). It is paradoxical that two poets of such contrary styles—one plain, the other baroque—fit comfortably within the rubric of purity, but it is a paradox that echoes the dialectical nature of purification. Addressing the radical sparseness of Williams’s “The Red Wheel Barrow,” Hartman articulates the gist of the paradox: The cleanliness, however, of Williams’s phrasing depends so much on what is edged out that we become more interested in what is not there than in what is. . . .The strength of pure poetry resides, then, like all poetry, in the impure elements it cuts out, elides, covers up, negates,

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The Machine that Sings represses . . . [Hartman’s ellipsis] depends on: and the strength of impure poetry in the very idea of purity that makes it go—and go like— crazy. (Criticism 121)

Williams’s poetry is energized by the “impurities” it leaves out; Crane’s by the “impurities” (neologisms, archaisms, solecisms) it flaunts as a means of renewing poetic language. Crane belongs in Hartman’s company of “dangerous purifier[s],” poets “so intense . . . they place so great a burden on the shoulders of poetry, that language breaks with itself” (131). But difficulty in Crane is not always so radical that it “points to a hypostasis of language” (Steiner 46). Many of the White Buildings poems written before 1923 are far less recondite than the three poems examined here. The diction of “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” for instance, a much-admired poem completed in 1920, exhibits the qualities of lucid prose: There are no stars tonight But those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is In the loose girdle of soft rain. There is even room enough For the letters of my mother’s mother, Elizabeth, That have been pressed so long Into a corner of the roof That they are brown and soft, And liable to melt as snow. (6)

Even here, however, experiencing no difficulty in identifying what the poem is about, the attentive reader notes a play on the grammatical ambiguities of the genitive. The “stars of memory” are at once remembered stars and “memory’s stars,” a figure for memory itself.8 Absent from the rainy night, the stars exist only in the speaker’s memory of them as remembered stars. But the rainy evening, obscuring the real stars, also brings to life “memory’s stars,” the speaker’s desire to “remember” his grandmother’s erotic experience. “Memory’s stars” embody a phenomenon of consciousness with no actual physical existence. On the stylistic level, language does not seem to “break with itself” in this poem, yet the second stanza quoted above invests the fading “letters” with the same sense of linguistic deterioration at the root of the purifying impulse. These letters, “pressed so long . . . That they are . . . liable to melt as snow,” are at once the

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grandmother’s epistles, the actual letters inscribed upon them, and, more subtly, language itself. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF PURITY The complementary concepts of purity and defilement that I have invoked are critical to the history of both modern poetry and anthropology; indeed, the fact that they have this in common reflects their own intertwined histories, as James Clifford has shown in his examination of the extensive cross-fertilizations between ethnography and Surrealism in France during the 1910s and 1920s.9 Crane’s fascination with things “primitive,” which he shared with many figures of his era, coincides with a historical turn toward modes of language and thought that were perceived as more “pure” than those that degraded the modernity these writers found themselves inhabiting. Crane’s familiarity with anthropology is hard to document, but a 1923 letter to Jean Toomer includes the desultory remark that he has been reading James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (Unterecker 329), at that date already widely admired. Eliot’s famous citation of Frazer’s study in the notes to The Waste Land, where he calls it a work “which has influenced our generation profoundly” (50), was almost certainly old news to Crane, since there is ample evidence that Crane read the essays Eliot published during the late 1910s in The Egoist, The Little Review, and elsewhere with great attention—essays that include remarks on Frazer in particular and anthropology in general.10 For instance, in a 1918 piece in The Egoist, Eliot asserts that “the artist . . . is more primitive, as well as more civilized than his contemporaries” (qtd. in Bergonzi 74). While on the surface this statement appears contradictory, Eliot is pointing toward the idea that the primitive was one of the sources for the renewal promised by modernism. As he puts it in another 1918 piece, as it is certain that some study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized man, so it is certain that primitive art and poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry. Primitive art and poetry can even, through the studies and experiments of the artist or poet revivify the contemporary activities.11

As I will show at more length in Chapter Three, Crane was caught up in this general fashion for primitivism and shared Eliot’s conviction that the modern and the primitive were engaged in an important interchange. More specifically, I argue that Crane represents Native Americans in The Bridge in a manner that shows the imprint of the discourse of ethnographic

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authenticity. Since the impact of the primitive on modernism is mediated by this anthropological discourse, it seems reasonable to look for links between this discourse and Crane’s rhetoric of purity. Accordingly, I will turn to the anthropological approach to purity employed by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger to frame my understanding of how the dialectical nature of purity shapes the interplay between purity and defilement in Crane’s poems of erotic crisis. Douglas’s analysis of pollution concepts grows out of her critique of the invidious distinction drawn between “primitive” and “advanced” religion by early anthropologists, in particular by Frazer. The Golden Bough locates the defining characteristic of primitive religion in its failure to discriminate between the sacred and the unclean. According to Frazer, “taboos of holiness agree with taboos of pollution because the savage does not distinguish between holiness and pollution” (qtd. in M. Douglas 10). Douglas does not dispute the evidence that religions, primitive and modern, “often sacralize the very unclean things which have been rejected with abhorrence” (15). Frazer’s mistake, in her view, along with the tradition he fostered, was his inability to see that modern notions of dirt are just as symbolic as their primitive counterparts: If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity. (35)

Once we recognize that things are not in themselves dirty, that dirt is a “residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications” (36), it becomes possible, according to Douglas, to understand how unclean things, such as products of the body or totem animals, can be used in rituals as a means of purification. In Douglas’s view, power resides in the ritual incorporation of that which has been designated anomalous by a cultural system. Such rituals reconcile the system’s order with that which has been defined as disorder; in so doing, they acknowledge the frame itself as fictive, as something invented by humans in order to make sense of a chaotic cosmos. These rituals of purification are the points at which a system acknowledges

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that which lies outside the system, thereby renewing and invigorating it. As Douglas puts it, The special kind of treatment which some religions accord to anomalies and abominations to make them powerful for good is like turning weeds and lawn cuttings into compost. (163)

Objects at one time considered the source of dangerous contagion and destruction are at other times creative, the means of purification. Following the lead of Allen Grossman, I will employ Douglas’s anthropological analysis of pollution taboos as a way of approaching Crane’s poetics of difficulty. The semantic ruptures cultivated by Crane grow out of his attitude toward poetic rhetoric as a ritual performance capable of effecting purification through the presence of such linguistic anomalies as solecisms, archaisms, and neologisms. In his poems of erotic crisis, Crane treats the body as an especially potent symbol through which purification can be reached, again, via the body’s defilement. Pursuing purity by way of defilement, a kind of via negativa toward sublimity, Crane is, on one level, seeking to erase conventional distinctions between the sacred and the profane in order to expose the unity between them obscured by the veneer of “civilization.” He believes, following the anthropological views popularized by Frazer and others, that by conflating the unclean with the sacred he is tapping into the authenticity that his generation found in various avatars of the primitive—non-Western cultures, the sexual instinct, animals, the unconscious. As one of the “exponents of terrible honesty” described in Ann Douglas’s cultural history of 1920s New York, Crane “prided [himself ] on seeing through things . . . through the conscious figure of civilized man himself to the savage, the beast in the unconscious psyche repressed and chained but ready . . . to spring free and take over” (40). Pursuing purity by embracing impurity is paradoxical, but Mary Douglas holds that such a paradox is intrinsic to all quests for purity: Whenever a strict pattern of purity is imposed on our lives it is either highly uncomfortable or it leads into contradiction if closely followed, or it leads to hypocrisy. That which is negated is not thereby removed. The rest of life, which does not tidily fit the accepted categories, is still there and demands attention. The body, as we have tried to show, provides a basic scheme for all symbolism. There is hardly any pollution which does not have some primary physiological reference. As life is in the body it cannot be rejected outright. And as life must be affirmed,

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The Machine that Sings the most complete philosophies, as William James put it, must find some ultimate way of affirming that which has been rejected. (163–4)

Crane’s poems of erotic crisis enact just this sort of ritual affirmation of “that which has been rejected.” The eroticized body, in extremis, bears the scars of its difficult passage and is symbolically purified by the ordeal. AN EROTIC TRIPTYCH Since the dialectic of purity plays itself it out within “Possessions,” “Voyages,” and “The Wine Menagerie” in significantly disparate ways, I will treat these poems as a triptych through which the pendulum swings from purity to defilement. Purity holds the upper hand in “Voyages,” where the immediacy of the eroticized body is almost completely subsumed by the fantasy of a pure language of sublimity, what the poem calls “The imaged Word.” “Possessions,” by contrast, is ruled by a fantasy of total defilement which threatens to subsume language in the opaque symbolism of the body in the grip of an annihilating erotic anguish. “The Wine Menagerie” falls between these extremes. Succumbing to neither fantasy, the poem refrains from resolving the dialectic of purity and defilement in favor of either polarity. In “The Wine Menagerie,” Crane thus achieves a tough-minded psychological posture toward the sublimation entailed in fantasies of purification—a toughmindedness absent from the other two poems. In the same lines from “The Wine Menagerie” in which Crane represents the body as a surface imprinted by cultural taboos, he offers an epiphany of purification in which these bodies are cleansed of their sexual “stigma” and perceived as “new anatomies”: Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out, Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals: Between black tusks the roses shine! New thresholds, new anatomies! (23–4)

However, this moment of purification is followed by a scene of what Thomas Weiskel calls “desublimation,” in which the speaker resigns himself to the impossibility of permanently achieving either poetic or corporeal purity: —Anguished, the wit that cries out of me: “Alas,—these frozen billows of your skill! Invent new dominoes of love and bile . . .

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Ruddy, the tooth implicit of the world Has followed you. Though in the end you know And count some dim inheritance of sand, How much yet meets the treason of the snow. (24)

Like other poems of disillusion that Weiskel identifies as “a great contrary tendency in Romanticism,” here “The Wine Menagerie” interrogates the efficacy of poetic language, the “frozen billows of . . . skill.” The poem “reads itself,” grows “skeptical of its fictions,” placing “the reality principle and fantasy . . . irrevocably at odds” (56–7). Rather than closing with the utopia of language designated as an “unbetrayable reply” in “Voyages,” or with the apocalyptic “white wind” of “Possessions,” “The Wine Menagerie” ends suspended between the desire for purity and the recognition that purity is unachievable. In its final couplet “The Wine Menagerie” balances resignation and resiliency with two self-contained, end-stopped lines pivoting neatly on a jarring off-rhyme: —And fold your exile on your back again; Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin. (24)

Here Crane turns to the sad puppet of Stravinsky’s ballet as an embodiment of what Grossman speaks of as the “comedic hopefulness” (224) that is one of the most distinctive attributes of Crane’s work. Although Petrushka dies at the hand of a jealous love-rival, Stravinsky gives him the final word, ending the ballet with the sudden appearance of Petrushka’s ghost on the top of the puppet booth, from which he mocks the startled puppet-master who had been dragging Petrushka’s limp body from the stage.12 In a poem that dwells on the tribulations of the body in extremis, where erotic coupling provokes fears of physical mutilation, it is striking that Crane speaks here of the heart with a figure that deflects signification far from the physical body-part to which it refers, pointing instead toward an emblem of the heart as the spiritual organ of love. The resiliency of the human heart is a pendular valentine, swinging like the pining heart of a clown between dreams of pure love and the defiled realities of human eroticism, between, in the words of the poem, “new anatomies” and “poor streaked bodies.” Alienation, on the other hand, the “exile” from purity, is figured as a physiological burden hoisted onto the body. Of the three poems, “The Wine Menagerie” proposes the most compelling intellectual and psychological posture because it remains cognizant of purity and defilement as complementary conceptual polarities that depend

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on each other for their vitality. Even so, “Voyages” is often considered Crane’s preeminent achievement, in R. W. B. Lewis’s words, “undoubtedly Crane’s lyrical masterpiece” (148); in 1931, Crane himself ranked “Voyages II” and “Voyages VI” (after “To Brooklyn Bridge”) as his best poems for Louis Untermeyer’s anthology, The Book of Living Verse (Unterecker 681). I do not dispute these valuations of the sheer lyricism showcased in the sequence, but “The Wine Menagerie” has yet to be recognized as Crane’s tough-minded but nevertheless sublime alternative to the fantasy of purity set forth in “Voyages.” Here it is helpful to consider William James’s preference for religions based on a firm recognition of evil, over religions like Christian Science that tend to reject evil. Mary Douglas invokes this judgment from The Varieties of Religious Experience in order to ally her analysis of “dirt-affirming philosophies” with James’s description of “the completest religions.” “[S]ince the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones,” James asserts that the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope. The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. (165)

Of the three poems I identify as Crane’s most ambitious treatments of the eroticized body, “The Wine Menagerie” is most successful at coming to terms with the “pessimistic elements” symbolized by the body while still affirming the authenticity of the quest for purity.13

“POSSESSIONS” AND THE FANTASY OF DEFILEMENT In “Possessions,” the first of the three poems to be considered in depth here, Crane portrays the human body in the grip of an exhilarating and destructive eroticism, caught within what the poem calls “this fixed stone of lust” (18). The poem is unusually frank, for Crane, about its sexual subject-matter. Desire is, arguably, the overriding concern of his poetry, but it is rare in the poems to come across such a forthright treatment of what Sherman Paul calls “the driven sexual adventurer” (110), much less a specifically queer experience of cruising. As Robert K. Martin has written, “Possessions” occupies a special place in the history of American modernism because it is “probably

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the first poem of the modern urban homosexual in search of sex” (Homosexual 128). The less familiar version of the poem is even more explicit. Published in The Little Review two years before its 1926 appearance in White Buildings, the earlier text of “Possessions” includes a transparent though brief depiction of anal intercourse in which the speaker of the poem is described as “rounding behind to press and grind.” This passage, so out of character with Crane’s typically elliptical language, and Crane’s decision to suppress it, help us sort out the connections between the urge to purify, the representation of eroticism, and Crane’s poetics of difficulty. The line has been all but ignored by Crane’s critics, even though the Little Review text is reproduced in Brom Weber’s 1948 study, which remains one of the most important sources for Crane’s textual variants. While it is not too surprising that earlier studies are reticent about this passage (Weber himself makes no comment whatsoever), one would have expected the gay studies scholarship on Crane to have focused on this instance of apparent self-censorship, since it seems to corroborate the notion that Crane’s homosexuality placed him at odds with the mainstream of American modernism.14 The text of the poem as published in White Buildings is identical to the earlier version except for the omission of the fifth line of the second stanza, which appears in the Little Review text as follows: Accumulate such moments to an hour: Account the total of this trembling tabulation. I know the screen, the distant flying taps And stabbing medley that sways— Rounding behind to press and grind; And the mercy, feminine, that stays As though prepared. (Weber 225)

Had Crane come to believe, after two years, that the line was “over the mark,” that such bald language diminished the mystique of the poem’s eroticism by crossing a threshold of explicitness? Or was he simply exercising caution in light of the confiscation of issues of The Little Review and Broom, and the refusal of United States Customs to allow Ulysses into the country, all because they were perceived as obscene?15 Crane followed these events with great attention, calling the censorship of Ulysses a “situation terrible to think on” (73). Even if the line was not interpreted as a description of sex between men (gay readers probably would, while straight readers might or might not), anal intercourse was and remains a taboo form of sexual behavior falling within what Foucault calls “that utterly confused category” (Sexuality 101), sodomy.16

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It is hard not to view the revision as an instance of self-censorship, but it is less clear as to whether the change improves or harms the poem. Rhyming “behind” with “grind,” Crane alludes to the “bump-and-grind” routines coming into vogue on the stages of burlesque theaters during the 1920s, routines that became more salacious as the decade wore on. As I show in the following chapter, Crane himself was a frequent and enthusiastic spectator at these performances, which were important meeting places within the gay subculture of the period, during the very time he composed “Possessions.” His decision to exclude this line thus coincides with his awareness that the growing popularity of burlesque brought with it the unwelcome scrutiny of those who wished to censor burlesque on the basis of obscenity. However, it could be argued that Crane did not alter the line primarily so as to avoid public disclosure of his sexuality. Instead, Crane may have revised the stanza because he judged the sing-song rhyming of “behind” and “grind” as out of synch with the tone of high seriousness pervading the poem. Except for the rejected line, only a willful association with the flamboyantly effeminate persona known at the time as a “fairy” (Chauncey 102–6) could render the poem into a campy display of erotic anguish. For instance, the passage in the third stanza—“And I, entering, take up the stone / As quiet as you can make a man . . .”—could conceivably be read with the sarcastic sneer of a queen. It is hard, however, to imagine the stark declarations of the ending of the poem—such as, “The pure possession, the inclusive cloud / Whose heart is fire shall come” (18)—spoken in such a tone of voice. On one level, Crane was merely refining the poem’s internal consistency, purifying it of a stylistic aberration that had injected a hint of burlesque. The alteration of the poem reflects his anxiety about publicizing his homosexuality to the wider audience that would read his book—beyond the select group of modernists who read The Little Review—but it also signals his apprehension that poetry in which eroticism is linked with the sublime could easily be transposed into its parodic opposite. This is the dilemma of representing eroticism: in order to retain what Crane considers its most profound qualities—that is, to keep it “pure”—he felt he had to cloak the contextual circumstances within which erotic acts occur. In the Little Review text, the subject of the verbal construction “rounding behind” is the “I” who “know[s] the screen.” The speaker knows the screen, the taps, the medley, and the mercy, all while “rounding behind to press and grind.” In the revised text, the speaker’s act has been effaced; he has become a mind that knows, not a body that experiences both pleasure and pain. Crane eliminates the representation of the sexual act, providing instead only the knowledge that it brings.

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“Possessions” nevertheless retains traces of the mundane circumstances surrounding the sexual trauma. The speaker’s anguish, his “turning on smoked forking spires” (18), occurs not in some solipsistic realm of purified language but in Bleecker Street, a location bearing a specific social history. George Chauncey’s groundbreaking work of social history, Gay New York, confirms that this bit of urban geography is not merely a synecdoche for the bohemian ambiance of Greenwich Village during the 1920s. It is instead a specific allusion to a street that was well known for its openly homosexual bars, clubs, and restaurants from around the turn of the century through the 1930s. One Bleecker Street establishment, “The Slide,” was particularly notorious for prostitution; it was called, in one 1915 account, “one of the most vile, vulgar resorts in the city, where no man of decent inclinations would remain for more than five minutes without being nauseated” (39). In re-writing “Possessions,” then, Crane suppressed its homosexual content only in part. For those who can read the clues, it remains in the reference to Bleecker Street, in the phrase, “to make a man,” and, more subtly, in the elliptical ithyphallic imagery. Yet none of these half-hidden signs of homosexuality unveil sexual details as explicitly as “rounding behind to press and grind.” Although the deleted passage is uncharacteristically direct for Crane, “Possessions” is dense with tropes and syntactic structures that have, from the beginning, proved notoriously resistant to a normative interpretation. Crane himself points out with satisfaction that the poem “really cannot be technically explained” (CPS 222). For him it is both inexplicable and perfect. As he writes to Jean Toomer (to whom he had sent an early version of “Possessions” that includes the depiction of anal sex), “I try to make my poems experiences, I rather don’t try, when they are good they are—like ‘Possessions.’ And bright stones—in the end” (192). In spite of its hermetic qualities, we are never in doubt that “Possessions” is a meditation upon the “fixed stone of lust” (18) that energizes the speaker while also exacting intense pain. We are called upon to “witness” a search for sex in which the speaker “[a]ssaults outright for bolts” of erotic experience. We are not, however, provided with a narration of sexual exploits. Crane leads us instead through a sequence of figures that link eroticism with pain and violence without actually describing specific instances of sexual activity. So we encounter a speaker subjected to a “stabbing medley,” “wounded by apprehensions,” “turning on smoked forking spires,” “tossed on . . . horns”—a speaker who, finally, “bleeding dies” (18). These signs of erotic anguish, cast in an ithyphallic imagery of horns and spires, bolts and keys, never coalesce into a narrative of sexual encounters; they tend instead to obscure erotic details while simultaneously insisting on their intensity. The poem is confessional in so far as

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it bares the speaker’s private obsession with erotic anguish, but Crane very deliberately turns away from a full-blown confessional narrative. Following the abrupt apostrophe (“Witness now this trust!”) with which it opens, “Possessions” propels the reader through a run-on sentence that occupies all nine lines of the first stanza. Crane gives these lines a jittery stop-and-go rhythm, on the one hand impeding their flow with two sharp medial caesuras, on the other pressing them forward by enjambing every line. In the third line, the first caesura severely disrupts syntactic clarity, since it leaves hanging an uncompleted subordinate clause: Witness now this trust! the rain That steals softly direction And the key, ready to hand—sifting One moment in sacrifice (the direst) Through a thousand nights the flesh Assaults outright for bolts that linger Hidden,— (18)

In the next fragment, we locate, with some effort, subject (“the flesh”), subordinate clause (“sifting / One moment in sacrifice”), and predicate (“Assaults outright for bolts”), but we are led as well to read “sifting” back into the preceding subordinate clause, since it lacks a verb. The apostrophe “O undirected,” which halts the flow of the sentence after “Hidden,” elides its subject so that it is not immediately clear whether what is undirected are the bolts, the flesh, or the subjective voice conveying its confession with such hesitancy: O undirected as the sky That through its black foam has no eyes For this fixed stone of lust . . . (18)

With the clinching rhyme of “lust” with the “trust” that sets the poem into action, a prosodic key clicks the meandering stanza shut as if the speaker, upon uttering “lust,” names the power within which he finds himself trapped. After many indirections, we are provided with the blunt monosyllable, “lust,” the word for which we have been waiting. We discern, as well, the pun that both these words make on “thrust,” both the erotic and poetic thrusts we are asked to witness. The sense of pollution with which this lust is associated manifests itself in a revealing inversion of the customary use of water as a trope for cleansing.

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The “black foam,” a reference to both the evening darkness and the dirtiness of the rain-water, figures a diffuse sense of defilement, an uncleanliness that suffuses the atmosphere, making it noxious and disorienting. But looking closer at the “foam” yields even more illuminating aspects of this figure of pollution. Any kind of bubbling on the surface of a liquid produces foam, but it is often associated with the corporeal processes that generate saliva and sweating; it is also often considered a physical sign of anger, as when foam gathers at the mouth. In general, then, foam signifies some sort of agitation. “Black foam” is a figure for the agitation and defilement the speaker seeks in eroticism: he sees it around him, enveloping him from the beginning, when “the rain . . . steals softly direction.” While one would expect the rain to be cleansing, Crane transforms it into a “black foam” of defilement. Yet it must be kept in mind that the fantasy of total defilement operating in “Possessions” ultimately leads to the purifying “white wind” at the end of the poem. The rain does indeed purify the speaker, not because it is clean, but because it is dirty. In the second stanza, the speaker steps back from this lurching, disorienting “sifting,” this quest for the “direst” erotic experience possible, to assess the cost exacted. Tallying up these costs, he strikes the pose of one who knows, who will tell us he knows, but who will not or cannot divulge what he knows: “I know the screen, the distant flying taps / And stabbing medley that sways” (18). His knowledge of the sublime, gained at the cost of sacrifice, is hidden in three enigmas: a “screen,” “distant flying taps,” and a “stabbing medley.” In the Little Review version, the tapping and stabbing motion amplify the frankly sexual pressing and grinding described in the deleted line. Without this line, these motions remain vaguely evocative of the penetration of a membrane, the “screen” of which the speaker becomes aware in the midst of his erotic anguish. Tapping and stabbing also link up with the subtle musical motif of the poem. The “key” in the first stanza is phallus, solution, and musical register; the “bolts,” phalli and bursts of music; and the “horns” of the last stanza are both bestial phalli and musical instruments. But it is the word “medley” upon which interpretative pressure is most fruitful. A medley is any sort of mixture, but it refers primarily to a disparate collection of songs. As an anagram of “melody” (in phonic if not in strict orthographic terms), “medley” suggests the lack of melody, the jumbled, unsettling “bolts of medley” that stab the speaker with the anti-music of the poem, the music to which the eroticized body “sways” in an ecstatic swoon. The “stabbing medley” is thus Crane’s figure for the defilement the speaker seeks in the painful eroticism of self-sacrifice. The final stanza seems to endorse confession as a model for writing. In the aftermath of his harrowing experience, the speaker is stripped of everything but an unmediated confessional voice that discloses

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The Machine that Sings piteous admissions to be spilt Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns Record of rage and partial appetites. (18)

The admissions revealed are secrets of the inner life transposed directly into writing, pouring out like blood spilt upon the page. These lines have the feel of closure, bringing the poem to rest in a clinching rhetorical blaze of rage and appetite, qualities that seem to sum up the kind of over-reaching poetry to which Crane was always committed. But the poem ends not here but in the three-line coda that summons a different kind of poetic record: The pure possession, the inclusive cloud Whose heart is fire shall come,—the white wind rase All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays. (18)

Admissions are confessions, but they are also entrances, thresholds to the language of “bright stones,” a lapidary, highly crafted language of sublimity, the creation of which entails the obliteration of all else. Thus we are left with what appear to be incompatible visions of poetry, the unmediated confession and the stylized “verbal icon.” It would reduce Crane’s poem to programmatics, however, to explain this contradiction by viewing the coda as an absolute negation of that which comes before. Here is where we must remember the trust with which the poem begins, a trust echoed in this final stanza by the admissions Crane calls “piteous,” an archaism signifying not the need for pity but the spirit of piety. Crane recounts his erotic anguish in “Possessions” with the conviction that seeking the extremity of defilement, and the recording of that quest, are the prerequisites to purification. “Possessions” ends with the annihilating “white wind” of purification, the stock Romantic figure of wind as creative spirit intensified to the extreme point at which creation and destruction converge. Such a condition of purity is realized, as the grammar indicates (purity “shall come”), only in its anticipation. At such a point, purity and impurity are reconciled by an “inclusive” poetic language, a language embracing both the ordering effect of closed form (the stately iambic pentameter, the rhymed couplet), and the disruptiveness of “rase,” a word over which the reader hesitates as if confronted with a misprint. In the earliest posthumous collection of Crane’s work, The Collected Poems of Hart Crane (1933), “rase” was in fact emended to “raze.”17 Upon consulting the OED, the first impression that “rase” is either a coinage or solecism is replaced with the knowledge that it is an older form of “raze,” used both by 17th- and 19th-century poets (Ben Jonson and Shelley)

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to whom Crane often looks for precedent. As an archaic synonym for both “raze” and “erase,” “rase” is typical of the diction of language purifiers, poets who, according to both Hartman and Steiner, employ archaisms in order to revivify poetry with the “purer” language of an earlier age. Crane is making an orthographic pun based on the idea that erasure may be seen as either the defilement of an earlier purity, or the purification of an existent pollution. The now-familiar term, “erase,” effaced the archaic “rase”; Crane, in turn, expunges the superfluous vowel and restores “rase” to its original form. What remains after the shaman’s fire-wind of erasure are the impenetrable “bright stones,” the sublime language beyond ordinary discursive language reached via the impurities that are the paradoxical handmaidens of purity. AN ÉCRITURE GAIE? Crane’s revision of “Possessions” raises questions about the extent to which his verse should be read as the “minority discourse” of a homosexual man writing during the 1920s, the guiding premise of Thomas Yingling’s Hart Crane and The Homosexual Text. Along with Robert K. Martin’s earlier study, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, Yingling’s book has had the salutary effect of moving the discussion of Crane’s homosexuality beyond the moralistic pathologizing that had marred many previous critical assessments of the poetry, in particular those by Crane’s contemporary acquaintances.18 It helped counteract what Martin calls the “atmosphere of guilt and secrecy” (Homosexual 233) that detracts from Brom Weber’s 1952 edition of Crane’s letters, which suppressed the names of his gay lovers. Weber also excluded many of Crane’s letters to Wilbur Underwood, the older gay man with whom Crane often corresponded about homosexual matters; the letters that are included conceal Underwood’s identity with blank spaces. The work of Martin and Yingling also helped set the stage for a number of other developments in Crane studies that restored the gay context to his life and work, including Langdon Hammer’s study, Hart Crane and Allen Tate, the new edition of Crane’s letters edited by Hammer and Weber, the two recent biographies by Paul Mariani and Clive Fisher, and other critical works. Yingling argues that the emphasis on myth in American Studies during the 1950s and 1960s occluded the queer dimension of Crane’s writing. As a corrective, he aims to produce a new and alternative reading of Crane’s work, placing it within a sexual-cultural matrix that highlights the problem of sexual

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The Machine that Sings identity and practice rather than allowing it to be glossed in a nationalcultural matrix in which the issue disappears. (13)

While my book builds on Yingling’s recontextualization of Crane’s work within a “sexual-cultural matrix,” it does not attempt to remake Crane’s poetry into the site of what Yingling calls an “ideological contest between homosexuality and poetic authority” (107). To his credit, Yingling acknowledges that “Crane himself might not recognize or perhaps appreciate” the “politicizing” of his work (14). Nevertheless, Yingling embraces what Tony Bennett calls the task of “actively politicizing the text, of making its politics for it” (qtd. in Yingling 13), an ideological approach that, in my view, tends to misrepresent crucial aspects of Crane’s poetics.19 My correction of the critical neglect of Crane’s figuration of the body is also “political” in so far as it shifts attention away from the old view of Crane as a gifted but untutored, flawed poet and calls for a reading that embeds Crane within a network of social discourses. However, in Yingling’s determination to use Crane as a means of exposing and resisting the stigmatization of homosexuality, he at times distorts Crane’s representation of eroticism into a social critique of homophobia. As a consequence, Yingling neglects to register the affinity between Crane’s poetry and Bataille’s conviction that “underlying eroticism is the feeling of something bursting, of the violence accompanying an explosion” (93). It is essential to take into account the “self-shattering” at work in what Tim Dean calls Crane’s “ontological lyric privacy,” which Dean argues “is founded on an experience that shatters its subject” (105). In an ambivalent review of Yingling’s book, Martin explains that “Yingling’s principal problem is his desire to make Crane into a hero, which sometimes prevents him from seeing the contradictions and self-torture of Crane’s life and work” (125). On the one hand, Yingling wishes to restore historical context in order to show that Crane was constrained by taboos on homosexuality and so devised an elliptical style in which he encoded “homosexual subjectivity.” On the other hand, Yingling argues, as I do, that Crane’s poetry is consistent with a Foucaldian view of sexual categories as cultural constructs, products of discourse that do not in themselves reflect any intrinsic sexual identity. Martin summarizes these contradictory objectives: Yingling seems to want to have at once a homosexuality that is a historically real site of persecution, a textual site of play, and the name for a volatiley constituted self. This multiple perspective is challenging and exciting but also the source of many of the books inner tensions. (Review 123)

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Martin is pointing toward one of the principal problems in Yingling’s study. On the one hand, Yingling reads the figures of defilement with which Crane represents the eroticized body as evidence of Crane’s internalized homophobia. At the same time, however, he casts Crane as engaged in a critique of what Foucault terms the “deployment of sexuality” (Sexuality 106), which marginalizes homosexuality as an abnormal personality trait. These contradictory objectives lead Yingling to misconstrue the significance of defilement in “Possessions.” Yingling considers “Possessions” a “polemical” poem that “rejects the rhetorical construction of homosexuality” as lust and “replaces it . . . with a more idealized vision of ‘bright stones’” (120). The problem with this reading is that it emphasizes the reversals of the last three lines and downplays the self-shattering eroticism through which the poem progresses to reach these reversals. For Yingling, “pure possessions” negate impure lusts, “the inclusive cloud” negates “partial appetites,” and “bright stones” negate the “fixed stone of lust.” But these reversals do not constitute a “rejection” of suffering; suffering and eroticism were inextricable for Crane, however much we may deplore such a psychology. Driven by his desire to overturn the stigmatizing rhetoric that has surrounded the treatment of homosexuality for so long, Yingling comes close to sanitizing the unsettling vision of eroticism Crane supplies in both “Possessions” and “The Wine Menagerie.” When Crane writes, in a 1926 letter, “Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and mockery” (261), it is clear that lust is not rejected; it is embraced fully as the route to purity because of its unassailable authenticity. It may be accurate to describe the final lines of “Possessions” as its speaker’s “transcendence” of lust, but only in the Hegelian sense of aufheben, to transcend without suppressing. This is the conceptual foundation of Bataille’s understanding of eroticism. “The mainspring of eroticism and of religion,” writes Bataille, is that “transgression . . . suspends a taboo without suppressing it” (36). Crane’s view of the erotic is closer to Bataille’s than Yingling allows. For Bataille, The first obvious thing about eroticism is the way that an ordered, parsimonious and shuttered reality is shaken by a plethoric reality . . . the individual splits up and his unity is shattered from the first instant of the sexual crisis. (104–5)

Crane echoes this sense of a self-shattering eroticism in a letter to Jean Toomer about an experience of erotic anguish that he attempts to convey in “This Way Where November Takes the Leaf,” a never-completed poem

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he sent to Toomer while working on it during the winter of 1923, the same period during which he wrote “Possessions.”20 Crane’s report of this erotic encounter emphasizes the same duality of “beauty and anguish” that marks “Possessions”: It keeps coming to me, though, in a kind of terrific rawness. And as I said, it is nothing to be overcome or superseded—its causes were outside myself—and its gift a broken thing. It does cry for words, however,—and I’m wondering if I’m equal to such an occasion, such beauty and anguish, all in one. (Unterecker 325)

The key statement is Crane’s insistence that the painful “rawness” of this experience “is nothing to be overcome.” Crane’s compulsion to purify, to seek the “pure possession” of a sublime language and a self-shattering eroticism, does not entail a negation of impurity; defilement is purity’s prerequisite. When Crane writes in his letters about his romances, he resorts to the same language of purification that governs his poems of erotic crisis. In what is probably the most well-known of these letters, he tells Waldo Frank that it will take many letters to let you know what I mean (for myself, at least) when I say that I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility. In the deepest sense, where flesh becomes transformed through intensity of response to counter-response, where sex was beaten out, where a purity of joy was reached that included tears. (186–7)

Embodiment and disembodiment coexist here as models of purity. On the one hand, Crane celebrates his love for Emil Opffer by turning to the Christian formula for the mystery of the Incarnation as an analogue for what he calls (further on in the letter) a “profound and lovely” love, a spiritual love. The sacred “Word,” like this spiritual love, is miraculously realized in the “flesh” of a human body. The rest of the letter, however, describes this eroticism in terms that suggest the reverse formulation: the flesh made word. Crane claims that sexual activity has led him beyond sexual love to a pure form of eroticism from which “sex was beaten out.” This purification, he implies, is the hallmark of authentic love. The turbulence of the physical contact between bodies—the “intensity of response to counter-response”—purifies eroticism of its sexual component. “Flesh becomes transformed” by pressing up against the physical limits of the body. Crane’s description of his ecstasy as “a purity of joy . . . that included tears” recalls the erotic anguish of “Possessions.”

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Unless this suffering is provoked, the purification he celebrates will not transpire.21 Crane makes this connection explicit in a 1923 letter to his mother: Suffering is a real purification, and the worst thing I have always had to say against Christian Science is that it willfully avoided suffering, without a certain measure of which any true happiness cannot be fully realized. (174)

In another letter that links the making of poetry with the sublimity of the body, Crane dwells with pleasure on a man’s physicality (a face “with faun precision of line”; “a mouth . . . just mobile enough to suggest voluptuousness”; “A smooth and rather olive skin that is cool—at first.”) before modulating from romance to writing: The climax will be all too easily reached,—But my gratitude is enduring—if only for that once, at least, something beautiful approached me and as though it were the most natural thing in the world, enclosed me in his arm and pulled me to him without my slightest bid. And we who create must endure—must hold to spirit not by the mind, the intellect alone. These have no mystic possibilities. O flesh damned to hate and scorn! I have felt my cheek pressed on the desert these days and months too much . . . . I long to go to India and stay always. Meditation on the sun is all there is. Not that this isn’t enough! I mean I find my imagination more sufficient all the time. (133–4)

“As though it were the most natural thing in the world”—as though and not in fact, for Crane knows that in Cleveland, in 1923, same-sex erotic attraction is a distinctly un-natural act. Beyond this evidence of Crane’s homosexual self-consciousness is the complex entwining of writing and eroticism as Crane jumps from one to the other somewhat like an analysand in the midst of free association.22 The fantasy of asceticism prompts his endorsement of a model of creativity based on the sublimation of libido into imagination, the sufficiency of which would make such an asceticism possible. His defensive interjection (“Not that this [meditation] isn’t enough!”) reflects the letter’s contradictory worship of and disgust with the body. He insists that the “mystic possibilities” of the body are indispensable to writers like himself, yet his melodramatic apostrophe (“O flesh damned to hate and scorn!”) seems wildly in conflict with the praise he has just lavished on the body as a source of creative power, but

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only if it is read as a self-indictment rather than a critique of social stigmas against homosexuality. In other words, this letter raises the question as to whether Crane has internalized the homophobia of his society, or whether he is critiquing the “deployment of sexuality.” Yingling views this letter as “a primary example of Crane forcibly mistaking his project for poetry,” which he characterizes as “an escape from” a world in which the “homosexual body was ‘damned to hate and scorn’” (85). But Yingling’s investment in the homosexual as victim somewhat distorts this letter. Crane cuts off his sensual catalogue to affirm a poetic that partakes of that sensuality, not one that denies it. The mind and intellect divorced from the body have no mystic possibilities for Crane; they lack the potency of the erotic episode that has instigated this meditation. His imprecation indicts not homosexuality but the cultural stigmas against it. Is poetry, in this letter, conceived of by Crane as an escape from these prejudices? It may be that Yingling’s belief that Crane is “mistaking his project for poetry” grows out of Yingling’s skeptical view of the humanistic ideal of universality, the “mistake” in Crane’s poetry that Yingling is trying to correct.23 These two letters suggest the way the body poses an impasse about human identity: the contradictory sense that although identity is defined by our bodily selves, an entity in addition to or “outside” the body comprises the linchpin upon which identity depends, whether we call such an entity “soul,” “ego,” or “consciousness.” We both are and are not our bodies. As Sharon Cameron phrases it in her study of the body in Melville and Hawthorne, “it is just because the self has a non-bodily part (a soul, essence, a voice in the mind) that the problem of personal identity, or the confusion of boundaries, so persistently occurs” (8). This problematic relation between psychological and corporeal identity is one of the sources of Crane’s double-edged depiction of the body in “Possessions” as a source of power on the one hand, and, on the other, a vessel of agony. “Voyages” manifests this ambivalence as well, but in this case Crane gives full reign to the fantasy that the impurities of the body can be overcome by the ideal of a purified language. THE IMAGED WORD: “VOYAGES” AND THE INVISIBLE BODY “Possessions” and “Voyages” both conclude with emphatic affirmations of purity, both link purification with the activity of writing, and both endings emerge from oblique narratives of a body’s progress through erotic experiences in which pleasure mingles with pain. The purity summoned in the three-line coda to “Possessions” is steeped, however, in negativity, whereas “Voyages” closes with a serene assertion that purity has been achieved. In

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“Possessions,” the impurities of lust, the body, and the messy language of confession are swept away by a fiery cloud and “white wind,” leaving behind only “bright stones wherein our smiling plays.” As I have argued, these stones are tokens of the lapidary poetic language that Crane opposes to the unmediated language of confession evoked in the early lines of this final stanza. This negative purity founded on absence brings with it a subdued contentment, signaled by the clinching phrase, “our smiling plays”: The pure possession, the inclusive cloud Whose heart is fire shall come,—the white wind rase All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays. (18)

There is something oddly discordant about coupling a smile that “plays” over the face with the cries of pain and images of agony that we have been asked to witness, since “plays” (with its hint of mischief ) tends to undercut the apocalyptic “rase” with which it rhymes. But this discrepancy is consistent with the paradox upon which the poem is founded: that purity is to be sought through the defilement of painful, self-erasing eroticism. “Voyages” ends on the very different note of serenity. If purity is grasped in “Possessions” through a violent removal, a radical absence, it is achieved in “Voyages VI” by affirming the presence of an ideal poetic language: The imaged Word, it is, that holds Hushed willows anchored in its glow. It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know. (40)

The desire for an “unbetrayable reply” is another version of what Crane terms, in “General Aims and Theories,” as the quest for “a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate” (CPS 221). Both of these statements on poetics hold up silence as the condition to which poetry should aspire, but in this quatrain silence, and the purity it figures, is associated with visual images. The “imaged Word,” a kind of motto for Crane’s ideal language, raises philosophical questions about the relation between text and image. As W. J. T. Mitchell explains: The concept of the poetic image . . . tends to blur a distinction that underlies a large tract of poetics, the difference between literal and figurative language. . . . The image is . . . a term which designates both metaphor and description, both a purely linguistic relation

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One of the chief sources of opacity in Crane’s poetry is that it is often difficult (if not impossible) to imagine pictorial equivalents for his figures. For instance, in the line from “Atlantis,” “The agile precincts of the lark’s return” (106), one can visualize the lark, but not the “agile precincts.” Crane’s rhetoric generates “images” impossible to visualize, thus seemingly not images at all. In his phrase “the imaged Word,” Crane claims for poetic language what Hartman calls “picturing potential” (Criticism 23), or what the classical rhetoricians called enargeia (vivid description), but only so as to highlight the linguistic basis of poetic imagery. Crane’s formulation also suggests connections to—and crucial differences with—the aesthetic program of Imagism, even though his proclivity for baroque circumlocution places him at odds with the stylistic prescriptions for Imagist poetry that began to circulate in 1913, some ten years before the composition of “Voyages.” The doctrinal statements by first Pound and then others like Richard Aldington stress concision and precision of diction, in Pound’s words, “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” (Literary 3).24 Pound’s characterization of H.D.’s poem “Hermes of the Ways” reflects these ideals: Objective—no slither—direct—no excess of adjectives. etc. No metaphors that won’t permit examination.—It’s straight talk—straight as the Greek! (qtd. in Kenner 174)

This dimension of Imagism—its determination to pare down poetic diction and its reaction against what it perceived as the figurative excesses of Romanticism—had a much more discernible impact on the course of modern poetry than its less readily understood “Doctrine of the Image,” in which Pound defines the “Image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Literary 4). While the poetic mode that grows out of William Carlos Williams corresponds to the side of Imagism that champions rhetorical simplicity, Crane responded to the dimension of Imagism that was, in spite of its professed anti-Romantic animus, rooted in the concept of what Frank Kermode calls the “Romantic Image”: “a means to truth, a truth unrelated to, and more exalted than, that of positivist science, or any observation depending upon the discursive reason” (44). When Crane distinguishes himself in “General Aims and Theories” from “impressionism,” he sets himself apart from poets who

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adopted the stylistic precepts of Imagism to the exclusion of its more conceptual implications: The impressionist is interesting as far as he goes—but his goal has been reached when he has succeeded in projecting certain selected factual details into his reader’s consciousness. He is really not interested in the causes (metaphysical) of his materials, their emotional derivations or their utmost spiritual consequences. A kind of retinal registration is enough, along with a certain psychological stimulation. . . .The impressionist creates only with the eye and for the readiest surface of the consciousness, at least relatively so. (CPS 220)

Crane refrains from attacking “Imagism” by name because he is deeply committed to the concept of the poetic image that the movement’s name suggests. Although Crane’s “imaged Word” is not equivalent to the “retinal registration” at the basis of Imagist poetics, it does have affinities with Pound’s idea of “an intellectual and emotional complex.”25 The composition history of “Voyages VI” also shows that Crane made a special effort to link the “Voyages” sequence with the idealization of the “Image.” “Voyages VI” is a substantially re-worked version of the unpublished poem “Belle Isle,” written in 1923 before “Voyages” had been conceived.26 Most of “Belle Isle” was discarded or drastically revised, but Crane carried over its final stanza virtually intact as the conclusion to “Voyages VI.” The only changes he made consist in two small but revealing alterations in the first line, which he changed from “It is the after-word that holds” (Weber 391) to “The imaged Word, it is, that holds” (40). The regularity of the iambic tetrameter remains the same, but by shifting “it is” to a medial position, Crane breaks the line into three segments separated by pronounced caesuras, slowing the line considerably and lending it the aura of repose that marks the entire stanza: motion comes to rest with the willows “anchored” in the “hold” of the “imaged Word.” The pronounced stasis with which “Voyages” ends contrasts with the pivoting motion at the end of “The Wine Menagerie,” where “Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin,” implying a resilience of the heart. The Bridge, too, ends with the extremely kinetic “Atlantis,” the final few images of which are the “leap” of “sidereal phalanxes” and the “swing” of “whispers antiphonal” (108). The substitution of “imaged Word” for “after-word”—and giving it the leading position in the quatrain—is of even greater consequence. In “Belle Isle,” “after-word” suggests that poetry is a consoling remnant of the erotic intensity recounted earlier in the poem:

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The “after-word” of poetry provides a solution for preserving the sublimity of eroticism. Like “Belle Isle,” “Voyages VI” opposes the permanence of an “unbetrayable” poetry to the inevitable ebbing of erotic feeling, but by injecting the concept of the image so explicitly into its closing moment, Crane raises the intellectual stakes by asking “Voyages” as a whole to be read not only as a love poem, but as a meditation upon the fantasy of purity that informs so much of Romantic and Modernist theorizing about poetry. As Kermode explains, poets in this Symbolist tradition “all obscurely wish that poetry could be written with something other than words, but since it can’t, that words may be made to have the same sort of physical presence ‘as a piece of string’” (136). Crane’s epithet for poetry as an “imaged Word,” as language invested with the immediacy of the visual, reflects his susceptibility to this desire to purify poetry of words. Paradoxically, such a fixation on purity yields poetry in which words are dwelt upon with intense care. The “hushed willows” that Crane offers as if in illustration of this kind of poetic language are, however, strangely out of place in the tropical ocean setting of “Voyages VI,” and more appropriate to the environment of marshes, hills, and willow trees that marks “Repose of Rivers,” a poem Crane places about midway through White Buildings. The image Crane chooses to exemplify the “imaged Word” is the purely imaginary one of an idealized pastoral landscape, compressed into a single emblematic object that refers inward to mental activity and not outward to any identifiable location. And yet because “hushed willows” are in fact quite easy to visualize, Crane seems to associate the “imaged Word” with two completely contradictory meanings: on the one hand it corresponds to representations of that which is visible, as the “hushed willows” image indicates; on the other, to such tropes as “agile precincts,” “adagios of islands” (“Voyages II”), and “mustard scansions of the eyes” (“The Wine Menagerie”), tropes in which language seems to trump vision by creating images that resist visualization. In Edelman’s view, the exaltation of the “imaged Word” is a “retrenchment” of Crane’s radical project of “language extension.” He argues that one mark of this retreat is the way in which the final stanza of the poem “subordinates sound to sight, giving up the aural presence of the ‘Word’” (177). The prominence of the impersonal pronoun “it” in these lines seems to corroborate this reading, since the cluster of three such pronouns suggests the reduction of language to a cipher, a form of silencing that negates the referential dimension

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of language so that it cannot compete with the immediacy of visual images. The emptiness of “it” is underscored by the fact that the first instance of “it” in the stanza is completely superfluous, since the sentence is grammatically coherent without the intrusive “it is”: “The imaged Word holds hushed willows anchored in its glow” is semantically identical to “The imaged Word, it is, that holds / Hushed willows anchored in its glow.” The final stanza of “Voyages VI” thus seems to concede ground to visuality at the expense of rhetorical power, and yet the images in “Voyages VI” are, on the whole, composed of tropes that draw attention to rhetorical ingenuity because of the way they defy visualization. The images of the shell and the setting sun in the second stanza are exemplary: Steadily as a shell secretes Its beating leagues of monotone, Or as many waters trough the sun’s Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone; (39)

The shell, the sun, and the “cape’s wet stone” supply one’s imagination with visual reference points, but the activities with which they are involved are difficult to picture. Crane links a consummate painterly image of the sublime—the reflection of red twilight in water—with a figure of the sun as a ship that equates reflected sunlight and a “kelson,” the longitudinal structure that secures the keel. As Edelman asserts, because “there is no ‘real’ solar equivalent to the kelson,” Crane’s figure “call[s] into question the distinction between figural and literal” language (166–7).27 Crane also alludes to Section Five of “Song Of Myself,” in which Whitman represents the reconciliation of body and soul as a sexual embrace, after which Whitman declares, “a kelson of the creation is love” (192). Crane adopts and extends Whitman’s association of the stabilizing effect of a kelson with love. In Crane’s intertwined figures, the sound of the shell and the movement of light are rendered as phenomena of great steadfastness and poise that bear the speaker forward to the encounter later in the poem with the goddess who embodies Eros.28 Crane also displays his rhetorical inventiveness with several phonic puns. Just as water “troughs” the sun, so Crane “tropes” sun into kel-son, as if “kel” were a prefix that changes the lexical significance of “sun.” “Trough,” upon which falls the primary metrical stress of the line, arrests one’s attention because it is a verb customarily used as a noun, and because the sound of its fricative “gh” is in such marked contrast with the long vowel sounds of the preceding two lines (“Steadily,” “secretes,” “beating leagues,” “monotone”).

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The shell itself is not really depicted at all; Crane instead renders its sound in a figure that mingles temporal, spatial, and corporeal qualities. A nautical unit of space (“leagues”) is equated with metrical “beats” as they extend through time, and the generation of this organic music is figured as a glandular secretion. The specificity of Crane’s verb, “secretes,” is crucial, for it allies the production of sound with purification and the body. Secretion is an organic process of the body (of all classes: human, animal, vegetable) in which fluids are separated from one another in order to either remove waste products (urine, for example) or create substances with specialized functions (such as saliva). Secretion is thus a trope for a process of purification, and the “monotone” it generates, in its uniformity of pitch, embodies the aural purity Crane desires. The resonance of Crane’s figure also consists in the fact that it draws on the iconic motif of the shell as an emblem for poetry. As John Hollander shows, although this motif has classical origins, it underwent important transformations in English poetry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In neoclassical verse, the shell serves primarily as an emblem for music, based on the classical myth that Hermes fashioned the original lyre out of a tortoise-shell. Romantic poets grafted the image of the sea-shell onto this myth, and conflated it with the notion that one can hear the sound of the sea in a shell (Hollander 18). Hollander draws attention to a key passage in The Prelude in which Wordsworth describes what a dreamer hears when he puts a sea-shell to his ear: And heard that instant in an unknown tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony; An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the children of the earth, By deluge, now at hand. (157)

Crane’s figure alludes to this Romantic habit of thinking of poetry as “an unknown tongue” freighted with apocalypse. The catastrophic dimension is muted in Crane’s figure, suggested only by the setting sun and the ominous quality of the “monotone.” Instead, Crane emphasizes poetry as an enigmatic language, signaled by the pun on the verb “secretes,” which signifies not only the production of glandular fluids, as discussed above, but also the act of concealment. Among the numerous other references to shells in Crane’s work, one case stands out because it demonstrates the depth of his preoccupation with “images of voice” (the phrase of Wordsworth’s from which Hollander takes his title), while also showing his ambivalence to the notion of a pure language. Following

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the epiphanic moment in “The Wine Menagerie,” in which eroticized bodies are cleansed of their “stigma” and perceived as “new anatomies,” Crane turns to the shell as just such an emblem of poetry: New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons Build freedom up about me and distill This competence—to travel in a tear Sparkling alone, within another’s will. Until my blood dreams a receptive smile Wherein new purities are snared; where chimes Before some flame of gaunt repose a shell Tolled once, perhaps, by every tongue in hell. —Anguished, the wit that cries out of me: “Alas,—these frozen billows of your skill! Invent new dominoes of love and bile . . . (24)

The chiming and tolling described here persuade one to view the shell as a substitution for the “bell” that Crane has, as it were, “removed” from the verse. It is as if the reader can hear the echo of the bell in the shell with which it rhymes. By associating the shell with a musical device, Crane looks back to the original form of the emblem as a lyre contrived out of a tortoise-shell. As in “Voyages,” the shell is associated with purity. No sooner has the pure music of poetry sounded, however, than the poet is beset with “anguish.” Here the shell ushers in a scene of what Weiskel calls “desublimation,” in which the speaker “submits to drastic reductions” and assesses the “spiritual costs” of having made a claim on the sublime (57). This shell bears an admonition akin to the portentous tolling of a bell. Like Wordsworth’s shell, its sound is the emblem of both poetic purity and the risk of “destruction” that the pursuit of such a purity entails. In “The Wine Menagerie,” the purity embodied by the “imaged Word” does not suffice, and Crane evinces his tough-mindedness by balancing the fantasy of purity with the recognition that purity is unachievable. The extent to which the “imaged Word” stands for a language of purity becomes even more clear when viewed in the larger contexts of “Voyages VI,” the six-part “Voyages” sequence, and White Buildings, especially when one attends to formal considerations. Cast in eight rhymed quatrains, “Voyages VI” is a paragon of order that conveys the notion of purity in its very prosody, since the formal perfection of the verse form is analogous to Mary Douglas’s

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view of purification as the effort “to impose system on an inherently untidy experience” (4). The rhymed quatrain is not uncommon for Crane; on the contrary, it is, as Grossman writes, Crane’s “metrical signature,” one of his favorite “closural structures” (222).29 But by reserving this form for only the last of the “Voyages” poems, which is also the concluding poem of White Buildings, Crane highlights its presence in the book, giving it a kind of hieratic significance. In addition, “Voyages VI” is the only poem in the “Voyages” sequence in tetrameter, while pentameter is the prevailing meter of the book as a whole. The metrical compression of “Voyages VI” contributes to the sense that the reading of White Buildings is meant to be experienced as if one is passing through an alembic, arriving, at its end, at some purified poetic essence. The tetrameter lines also echo the four-line pattern of the stanzas, contributing to the overall symmetry. Finally, Crane divides the poem exactly in half: the first four quatrains consist of a single involuted sentence, while the second four quatrains are occupied by a second sentence crowded with subordinate clauses, followed by a closely linked, much shorter third sentence out of which the final quatrain is composed. In the first half of the poem, the speaker identifies himself as a “blinded guest” who awaits a “name, unspoke,” and prays that he will be rewarded with a sign of his initiation.30 In response to his supplication for a “splintered garland,” the speaker learns this unspoken name in the second half of the poem, not by hearing it, but by seeing it in the eyes of the goddess, which reinforces the priority given to vision over language in “Voyages”: Beyond siroccos harvesting The solstice thunders, crept away, Like a cliff swinging or a sail Flung into April’s inmost day— Creation’s blithe and petalled word To the lounged goddess when she rose Conceding dialogue with eyes That smile unsearchable repose— Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle, —Unfolded floating dais before Which rainbows twine continual hair— Belle Isle, white echo of the oar! The imaged Word, it is, that holds

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Hushed willows anchored in its glow. It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know. (39–40)

The “name” he “cannot claim” remains curiously unarticulated, although it is hinted at in a series of periphrases: “Creation’s blithe and petalled word,” “fervid covenant,” “white echo of the oar.” Some critics equate the name with Belle Isle, but this geographic reference seems incommensurate to the sublimity evoked by such namelessness.31 Belle Isle is but another screen behind which hides the shell’s secret message; it is a “white echo,” a repetition that whitens, or effaces, the name itself. Ultimately, it is the fantasy of a pure poetic language embodied in Crane’s motto, the “imaged Word,” that corresponds to the name of this “unspoken word.” As an emblem of that purity, the poem depicts a goddess in the act of raising herself from a reclined position but retaining “repose” in her facial expression. Critics have made many guesses as to which goddess Crane alludes to here, but giving her a name is less important than seeing her as an unspecified embodiment of erotic power, as Eros itself.32 There is a pictorial dimension to Crane’s representation of the goddess, conveyed by his characterization of her “lounged” posture, and by the anthropomorphic image of the rainbow as her hair. Her body as a whole is not, however, made visible. The eroticism she embodies is communicated not by any visual image of her body, but by two figures for poetic language: the “petalled word” (the poet’s “creation”), which associates poetry with the eroticism of flowers, and the image of the rainbow.33 Figuring the refracted light of the rainbow as a “fervid covenant,” Crane lends the rainbow a fiery intensity that evokes erotic passion. The figure of the rainbow equates “covenant”—the binding of the human with the divine—with the frenzy of erotic contact between bodies. The forging of a covenant and eroticism are also linked in the earlier image of the phoenix: O rivers mingling toward the sky And harbor of the phoenix’ breast— (39)

The phoenix, like the rainbow, is an emblem of renewal. It is also, in Celeste Schenck’s words, a symbol of “the combustion consummation produces” (81).34 Given Crane’s enthusiasm for Elizabethan verse, there is little doubt that he would have been familiar with the way such poems as Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and Turtle,” Donne’s “The Canonization,” and Crashaw’s “Epithalamion” all link the phoenix to eroticism. In a hint of the erotic

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bestiary that plays so large a role in “The Wine Menagerie,” Crane turns to the mythical bird as an emblem that marries the idea of covenant with sexual consummation. The phoenix is customarily depicted in the nest to which it returns, where it immolates itself and is reborn out of its own ashes. In place of the phoenix’ nest, however, Crane represents its “breast” as the destination of his voyage, emphasizing both the eroticism of the myth and the idea of nurture implied by a religious covenant. As in “The Wine Menagerie,” Crane turns to the symbolic language of the bestiary to convey eroticism without depicting the human body. In “Voyages VI,” the eroticized body is camouflaged by several factors. Crane’s evocations of the body’s sensuality are, first of all, concealed by the subtlety of his figurative language, as in the reference to bodily secretions in the guise of a description of sound from a shell, or in the way the “fervidness” of the body is displaced onto the effulgence of the rainbow. The phoenix, too, suggests the body and sexual consummation, but not by providing a direct image of the human body. The closest Crane comes to presenting the body is in the image of the goddess, but he refrains from supplying the imagery necessary to visualize her. Her “unsearchable repose” reflects Crane’s wish to preserve her image from the pronounced corporeality of the eroticized bodies in both “Possessions” and “The Wine Menagerie.” The idealization of erotic power residing in the goddess contrasts with the manner in which Crane represents the body in an earlier section of the “Voyages” sequence. The bodies of two lovers come together in a sexual embrace in “Voyages III”: And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise,— Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . . . (36)

Crane conveys the arousal of the body in the first six lines with a crescendo of rhythmic effects and with arresting images of erogenous regions of the body that remain somewhat ambiguous. As boundaries between bodies are

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traversed, the agitation of lovemaking is given prosodic form in a series of participial verbs (whirling, wrestling, kissing, rocking), a series of doubled images (light, star, wave, dawn), and a succession of three consecutive lines launched by the insistent thrusting of spondaic feet: Pást whírling píllars . . . Líght wréstling thére . . . Stár kíssing stár . . .

As the moment of consummation approaches, Crane gives the impression of a quickening of movement by making the interval between the doubled images shorter and shorter, with the two lights situated at opposite ends of a line, the two stars separated by the single word “kissing” (as it were) the space between them, and, finally, the two waves separated only by the tiny word “on.” These prosodic features contribute to Crane’s emphasis on the resistance that must be overcome for the moment of erotic ecstasy to transpire. Precisely because corporeal boundaries are in the process of being violated, Crane dwells on and underscores these boundaries by figuring the body in terms of architectural elements. Genitalia are figured as “gates,” legs as “pillars,” and what is probably the torso as the triangular-shaped “pediment.” Each of these structures are paired with modifiers which destabilize their architectural referents into hybrid images of the body as building. If one attempts to visualize the scene Crane has composed, one arrives at something similar to the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism: classical facades spinning among waves, along with swollen genitalia (or, perhaps, the anus) grafted onto gates. The striking thing about the way Crane represents the body at this crisis moment is that except for the single use of the very word “body,” all the references to the body are either adjectives (“lithe,” “swollen”) or verbs (“wrestling,” “kissing”). The thing itself, the body as noun, is withheld. Once again, Crane maintains a good deal of indirection when representing the body, even for this tableau of coitus. In “The Wine Menagerie,” intertwining bodies are represented as erasing the “stigma” of impurity by coming together in sexual union, transforming themselves into “new anatomies.” Purity is approached via the paradoxical method of polluting the self with the impurities of eroticism. In “Voyages III,” the impurity of the body is never brought into as sharp focus as the word “stigma” does in “The Wine Menagerie,” although it can be detected, perhaps, in the blackness of the genitalia, or in the sense of a taboo being transgressed in Crane’s emphasis on corporeal boundaries. In the

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portmanteau word for which Crane is so famous—“transmemberment”— there is also an implication that a condition of defilement has been overcome in the activity of lovemaking. As others have discerned, the word suggests both the breaking apart and reconstitution of the body. “Transmemberment,” the poem insists, is the miraculous alternative to “carnage,” a word that makes the association between eroticism and death especially fraught with animality and the putrefaction of the flesh. “Voyages III,” then, also proposes a kind of purification of the body through sexuality. The “change” that lovemaking effects, though, is closely linked to an ideal, lapidary poetic language, “the silken skilled transmemberment of song.” Crane is expressing the desire for something like a poetic voice that would exist free and clear of the body. In the course of the highs and lows through which the “Voyages” sequence passes, eroticism is treated as a metamorphic force that transforms impurity into purity. One proceeds from the cautious beginnings of “Voyages I,” in which children are warned that the “spry cordage” of their bodies will be subjected to an eroticism as “cruel” as the “bottom of the sea.” This warning fails to keep the speaker from engaging in an “unfettered” immersion into the erotic sea of “Voyages II,” a poem that evokes spatial (“rimless floods”) and temporal vastness (“that great wink of eternity”) as emblems of the sublime. “Voyages II” is a highly charged plea for boundlessness. Keeping in mind Mary Douglas’s view that dirt is the product of classification systems, it is possible to see how the desire for boundlessness is an attempt to get outside such a system entirely. “Voyages II” expresses the desire not for impurity, something Crane exhibits in “Possessions” and “The Wine Menagerie,” but the desire to transcend the conceptual framework of the purity/ impurity dialectic. Next comes the sexual consummation of “Voyages III,” discussed above. With “Voyages IV” there is a falling off as the speaker seeks to recapture the intensity of the erotic crisis by reiterating the binding that has transpired between the lovers. “Voyages V” marks the low point of the sequence, as the lovers experience a post-coital estrangement that Crane casts as a failure of language: What words Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved And changed . . . (38)

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The triumphant assertion of purity in “Voyages VI” emerges from out of this scene of “desublimation” in which the ebbing of erotic feeling prompts fears of poetic impotency. Finally, “Voyages VI” caps Crane’s meditation on Eros by affirming the achievement of a state of purity in the form of a highly crafted poetic language, the “imaged Word.” THE ANIMALITY OF THE BODY IN “THE WINE MENAGERIE” “Voyages” closes with a fantasy of purification from which the body has been effaced by a sublime language. “The Wine Menagerie,” however, closes with the desire for purity held in tension with the recognition that absolute purity is impossible to achieve because purity exists, by definition, only in opposition to impurity. Within “The Wine Menagerie,” pollution and purity are coupled repeatedly, perhaps most starkly in the lines in which “streaked bodies” give way to the exclamation, “Between black tusks the roses shine!” (23). Directly after encountering bodies defiled/ purified by sex, the reader is confronted by a theriomorphic image of defilement (“black tusks”) married with a botanic image of purity. This resort to a theriomorphic language frequently occurs when Crane turns to erotic scenarios, which suggests that he believed a symbolic bestiary was the most cogent means of conveying his sense of human eroticism. The bestiary offers Crane a language of mystery with which to evoke human eroticism without writing a mimetic erotica. Organized around the conceit that people drinking in a bar are like animals caged in a menagerie, “The Wine Menagerie” is probably Crane’s most theriomorphic poem. But animals appear as tropes for eroticism throughout his poetry. The “mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams” in “Repose of Rivers” (16); the “ape’s face” in “Recitative” (25); the “fox’s teeth” in “Lachrymae Christi” (19); the “serpent” who “leaned its tongue and drummed” in “Passage” (22); the phoenix in “Voyages” (39); the serpents, eagles, and other creatures in The Bridge—all the animals in Crane’s extensive bestiary signal, in one manner or another, the exhilarating and dangerous forces of eroticism upon which Crane’s poetry dwells so frequently. Crane was not alone in his attraction to bestiaries and menageries; they were, as Ann Douglas demonstrates, one of the defining motifs in both the popular and high culture of 1920s New York. As I have shown, this craze for menageries, and for “going public with one’s animal nature” (48), was part of the era’s fascination with the animality of the body.35 In the background of Crane’s bestiaries is also Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour, a book now largely forgotten but notorious in the

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1920s (in Ezra Pound’s 1922 translation, The Natural Philosophy of Love) for its quasi-pornographic taxonomy of the sexual habits of animals, insects, birds—and homo sapiens. Although it would be an overstatement to call The Natural Philosophy of Love a principal source for “The Wine Menagerie,” Crane’s enthusiasm for this and other works by Gourmont are relevant to any examination of eroticism in Crane’s work because they constitute the most direct textual link between Crane and the discourse of sexology. The more prominent practitioners of this modern science of sexuality—Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and of course, Freud, to name only a few—seem to have excited little if any of Crane’s interest. By contrast, he coveted Gourmont’s books like forbidden pleasures. He eagerly—and these are Crane’s words—“snatched . . . up” Aldous Huxley’s translation of Gourmont’s novel Un coeur virginal, expecting its “imminent suppression” for offending American sensibilities (73). Gourmont, for Crane, was a heroic figure in the crusade by modern artists against repressive sexual taboos, one member of a long list that in Crane’s mind included such diverse figures as Sherwood Anderson, Isadora Duncan, and James Joyce. As he puts it in a 1922 letter, Gourmont was “an adept scientist of the emotions,” “one of the most thorough students of physiology and psychology of the modern world” (82). Although Gourmont’s impact on the early years of modernism is well-known, and his catalytic effect on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot is welldocumented, he is rarely associated with Crane. Between 1919 and 1923, however, Gourmont was one of Crane’s pet enthusiasms, an exotic French writer promoted by his favorite avant garde magazines as, in Pound’s words, “an artist of the nude” (“De Gourmont” 2).36 Between September, 1921, and February, 1923, Crane mentions Gourmont in ten different letters to four correspondents: Gorham Munson and Allen Tate, two of Crane’s most important literary sounding boards during the early 1920s; William Wright, a boyhood friend and aspiring writer with whom Crane kept in touch for his entire life; and Wilbur Underwood, the older man who became one of his primary confidantes about things homosexual. Crane’s references to Gourmont range from relatively insignificant name-dropping to more substantive invocations of Gourmont as a literary master who was also an authority on human sexuality. The most important of these are contained in two 1922 letters to Wright in which Crane seeks to help his friend negotiate unspecified romantic difficulties: I am so much interested in you now, that I am in danger of pestering you with all kinds of advice and admonitions. One of these is: not to let the caprices of any unmellow ladies result in your unbalance or extreme

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discomfiture. Even the best of them, at times, know not and care not what they do. They have the faculty of producing very debilitating and thoroughly unprofitable effects on gentlemen who put themselves too much in their hands. Woman was not meant to occupy this position. It was only the Roman Catholic Church who gave it to her. Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians knew better how to handle her. I suggest your reading De Gourmont’s Virgin Heart for a delicate dissection of this kind of problem. De Gourmont was something more than a purely “literary critic,” you know. He was one of the most thorough students of physiology and psychology of the modern world. He was an adept scientist of the emotions. Stendahl was another, but less clear. (82)

Here Crane displays the kind of hostility toward women that is more commonly associated with such modernists as Pound, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. Crane follows up this letter with another one to Wright on the same subject: By this time I suppose you are back again and full tilt in your customary carousels. I was glad to know that the trouble with you was only “physiological.” By this time you have probably read some of De Gourmont’s observations on that sort of thing, and, wise man!, were fully experienced to appreciate them. (LHC 80)

Here Crane refers to scenes in A Virgin Heart in which the protagonist Hebart experiences an episode of impotency with his mistress after having “weakened” himself by falling in love with Rose Des Boys, a 20-year-old virgin, but restraining himself from sexual relations with her. Hebart consults Stendhal’s discussion of impotency in On Love, finds it wanting because of its stress on psychology rather than physiology, and then goes for advice to his physician, Bouret, a man given to expounding a philosophy of love very much akin to the one Gourmont develops in The Natural Philosophy of Love. Bouret advises Hebart: If you want a woman, take a woman and behave like a fine animal fulfilling its functions! And above all beware of young girls. Young girls have destroyed the virility of more men than all the Messalinas in the world. (185)

Bouret is a mouthpiece for Gourmont’s view of human nature, a peculiar blending of sociobiology and body mysticism:

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Crane’s admiration for Gourmont as a “scientist” who “dissects” the “kind of problem” Wright experienced echoes the effusive acclamation Pound and Eliot were according Gourmont in the pages of such magazines as The Little Review and The Egoist during these years. Gourmont had so thoroughly absorbed the empirical, comparative methods of science that his writing, according to Pound, displayed “the fairness of a man watching his own experiment in a laboratory.” The Natural Philosophy of Love, Pound declared, “should be used as a textbook of biology” (“De Gourmont” 6). Havelock Ellis, however, was less impressed; he dismissed the book as the work of a “heroic amateur” (qtd. in Sieburth 85). This posture of scientific objectivity is countered, however, by the hand of the ironic novelist, whose mark is readily apparent in the numerous vignettes describing various species in the midst of their sexual play. The following passage relates the habits of the epeira spider (the class of spiders that spin webs) with the kind of anthropomorphizing that marks much of The Natural Philosophy of Love: A day comes when the male is restless; the gnats fail to satisfy him; he leaves, abandons the home he will perhaps not see again. He is not, indeed, without misgivings, and fear is mingled with his desire, for the mistress he seeks is an ogress. Thus he prepares a way of retreat in case of combat; he stretches a thread from the female’s web to a neighbouring branch, road of entry, gate of exit. Often, the instant he shows himself with his excited air, the female epeira leaps on him and eats him without formality. Is it ferocity? No, stupidity. She also is awaiting a mate, but her attention is distraught between the coming of the caller and the coming of prey. The web has shaken, she leaps, enlaces, devours. Possibly a second male if he attempt the pass, will be gladly received, the first sacrifice accomplished, perhaps this mistake, if it is one, will wake all the amorous attention of the distracted female? Ferocity, stupidity; there is another explanation which I will give later, apropos the mantis and the green grasshopper: it is very probable that the sacrifice of the male . . . is absolutely necessary, and that it is a sexual rite. (89)

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This passage is of particular interest because it touches on Gourmont’s view of sexuality as a violent sacrificial ritual. One of Crane’s letters shows that he was especially intrigued by this aspect of Gourmont’s book: [Sam Loveman] has just given me a most charming work on Greek Vases (made in Deutschland) in which satyrs with great erections prance to the ceremonies of Dionysios with all the fervour of de Gourmont’s descriptions of sexual sacrifice in Physique de l’amour, which I am lately reading in trans. (92)

Both the ritualistic violence of the encounter between the man and woman in the third stanza of “The Wine Menagerie,” and the allusions to the ritual dismemberments of Holofernes and John the Baptist, recall Gourmont’s descriptions of the violence that often accompanies mating rituals. It is much easier to establish Gourmont’s importance to Crane through evidence external to any particular poem than it is to identify Gourmont as the unequivocal “source” for a specific poem or textual detail. Certain affinities nevertheless exist between the poems concerned with the eroticized body and the sexological ideas that Gourmont propounded in the two works Crane read with evident relish. The most convincing internal evidence for linking Gourmont and Crane is that “The Wine Menagerie” dwells on sexuality as a crucible of the pure/impure dialectic in a manner that recollects Gourmont’s musings in The Natural Philosophy of Love and A Virgin Heart. Like Gourmont’s books, Crane’s poem adopts the perspective of the naturalist, dissecting sexual behavior in terms of its government by animalistic instinct rather than sentiments of love. There is also a resemblance between the menagerie-like quality to The Natural Philosophy of Love and the conceit of the menagerie that underlies Crane’s poem. Moreover, the aggressiveness of the amorous encounter depicted by Crane matches the tenor of Gourmont’s vignettes of mating habits, such as the one quoted above. One may even be disposed to believe that the lovers in Crane’s poem take on the anatomical guise of Gourmont’s battling insects with the words “mallets” and “forceps,” though this may exaggerate the specificity of Crane’s allusion: Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her. Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets, Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world . . . (23)

Reading “The Wine Menagerie” in the context of Gourmont and sexology opens up the significance of the menagerie as Crane’s contradictory figure for

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both the cultural forces that confine the human body, and as a figure for the body itself as a cage within which the self is locked, especially when the body is in the grip of eroticism. Both Crane’s poem and Gourmont’s book are menageries in the elementary sense that they contain within them heterogeneous collections of animals. Somewhat disguised by the fragmentary manner in which its animals are presented—and I will detail this—Crane’s menagerie nevertheless shares with Gourmont’s more obvious one the logic by which human eroticism and animal sexuality are equated. In Gourmont’s words, his menagerie places humanity in its “proper and rather indistinct place in the crowd, beside the monkeys, rodents and bats” (3). While it was of course impossible for Crane to avoid encountering Freud’s theories of sexuality, there is very little concrete evidence that he gave Freud an attentive reading. Gourmont, by contrast, carried the imprimatur of Eliot and Pound, and was himself a poet, a relic of fin de siecle Paris, a much more exotic, exclusive source for sexual theories than the far more popular Freud. Most importantly for my argument, Gourmont’s ambition to describe “the mechanism of love” from the point of view of a natural scientist appealed to Crane because this perspective enables Gourmont to critique both the association of romantic love with moral purity and the rational basis of all sexual taboos. By equating human eroticism with animal sexuality, Gourmont echoes Crane’s doubleedged attitude toward eroticism as a force that harbors the seeds of purification in its very defilement. Crane’s representation of eroticism in “The Wine Menagerie” and “Possessions” is consistent with Gourmont’s polemic against “certain moralists” who “pretended to talk about ‘love in relation to natural causes’” (6), but who have merely cloaked biological necessity behind moral idealizations. “Voyages,” on the other hand, may have fallen into what Gourmont considers a sentimental trap: “The flowers we have strewn upon love may disguise it as one disguises a trap for wild beasts; . . . the aim of human life is the continuation of human life” (6). My reading of “Voyages” does not, of course, bring its view of eroticism down to this level; but the fantasy of purity that guides Crane in “Voyages” is without doubt at odds with the tough sensibility that he finds so appealing in Gourmont. The Natural Philosophy of Love is a witty compendium of the mating habits of a wide variety of species. Parading the specialized nomenclature of the natural scientist—“sexual dimorphism,” “fecundation,” “mammifer,”— Gourmont organizes his book as an anatomy, classifying organisms according to the forms of their sexual organs and to their methods of copulation. Like other sexologists, Gourmont wished to re-orient investigations of sexuality away from theological and moral frameworks to a scientific one that

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would illuminate the biological and psychological phenomena upon which they believed human personality is founded.37 But Gourmont pressed the envelope a little further than most by coming very close to equating human and animal sexuality: “Man is an animal, submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality” (4). He aims “to merge the two ideas, man and animal,” in order to “giv[e] man’s sexual life its place in the one plan of universal sexuality” (1). In so doing, he hopes to reclaim love from the sentimentalists and place its significance on an entirely different footing. “Love,” he asserts, “is profoundly animal; therein lies its beauty” (6). This equivalence between human and animal sexuality is the basis from which Gourmont argues against sexual taboos and the notion of sexual aberration. Since “there is no lewdness which has not its normal type in nature,” “debauchery loses all character and all its tang” (85). Sexual practices considered “perverse and even monstrous” by most people, are, from the naturalist’s perspective, “the right and the norm in one or another region of animal empire” (56). The extent to which Crane had internalized the understanding of homosexuality as a deviant pathology—and the extent to which he resisted it—remains unclear. There is no question, however, that Gourmont’s ridiculing of the idea of sexual deviancy would appeal to Crane, since we know that at least some of his literary friends— Allen Tate, Malcolm Cowley, Yvor Winters—were essentially unable to empathize with his gay lifestyle. As in Gourmont’s book, human and animal bodies are equated in “The Wine Menagerie,” although Crane accomplishes this by a variety of conceits. Based upon a conceptual design that mingles human with animal bodies, “The Wine Menagerie” veils its preoccupation with the body in a bewildering array of periphrastic figures of speech and ambiguous syntactic constructions typical of Crane’s mature style. The body does not emerge as an explicit focal point until more than halfway into the poem, but the conceit of the menagerie introduced by the title, and the animal motif this suggests, casts the poem from the beginning as an engagement with primal biological forces located in, or symbolized by, the body. The poem gradually builds toward a direct confrontation with the body in the sixth of its eleven stanzas, at which point the poetic speaker is mesmerized by the sight of “poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out” (23). In the climactic epiphany placed just a few lines later, the speaker utters the ecstatic exclamation that has become a touchstone of Crane’s poetics: “New thresholds, new anatomies!” (24). This elliptical turn of phrase evoking bodies as “anatomies” has been the object of much commentary, but it has not very often been read in conjunction with an inquiry into the role of the body in “The Wine Menagerie”; neither has

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it been considered in the wider context of Crane’s interest in the relation between eroticism and his concept of poetic language.38 The poem begins by dwelling not on the body as a whole, but on the sense of sight, by tradition the most “intellectual” or “spiritual” of the senses. In the opening of the poem, an oracular voice describes the sense of sight transformed by wine into a vehicle of visionary experience: Invariably when wine redeems the sight, Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes, A leopard ranging always in the brow Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze. (23)

Pitting a slumbering gaze against a ranging leopard, Crane maps the psychological readjustment provoked by intoxication in terms of the somatic transition from wakefulness to sleep, balancing the sedation of one body (the drowsing drinker) with the arousal of another (the animalistic id within). These lines also evoke the physicality of the human eye, first by drawing attention to the “narrowing” of the drinker’s eyes as their lids droop under the influence of alcohol, then by situating the eyes in their corporeal setting beneath the “brow,” a feature of the body that resurfaces later in the poem (the urchin’s brow) and that Crane often turns to elsewhere in his poetry as a physiognomic talisman by which inner states of consciousness can be read.39 The most striking representation of the eyes consists of another one of Crane’s figures that defy visualization. The phrase “mustard scansions of the eyes” is an enigmatic rhetorical invention with which Crane flaunts his poetic potency by creating what Hartman calls “non-naming figures,” images with “hallucinatory effect” that “are not images at all but periphrases” with “the structure of riddles” (Criticism 23). The color, taste, and texture of mustard set the terms of this riddle with which Crane names a quality of creative perception activated by intoxication. On a strictly mimetic level, mustard refers to the yellow color of the leopard’s eye, and perhaps to the eyes of the drinker, presumably bloodshot, or, less literally, “jaundiced” by drink. The pastiness of mustard also makes it similar to the viscous body fluids named in the poem (including bile, blood, sweat, manure), and thus suggests the liquid character of the eye. Scansion is an analytical activity that “cuts up motion into segments for counting” (Preminger 1118); it slows down the reading process to facilitate the discovery of underlying metrical patterns. In this sense, scansion has an effect similar to the slowing down of consciousness that accompanies inebriation and which Crane evokes, obliquely, in the lines: “Slow / Applause flows into liquid cynosures (23). “The mustard scansions of

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the eyes” is a figurative rendering of drunken perception, in which particular details are enhanced and blown out of proportion by a slowing down of cognition, which, by analogy, resembles the reader slowed by scansion. In addition to its effect on the senses, mustard in its vegetable form has ancient associations with fertility because of the ease and rapidity with which it propagates (Root 277–9). Coupling mustard, a pungent organic substance, with scansion, a technique of prosodic analysis, points less toward an image of the eye (in any visual sense of “image”) and more toward an idea of poetry as a vigorous, even caustic linguistic activity that is the product of an overripe imagination. Like mustard, Crane’s poetry is an irritant, stimulating and confounding the senses until, as Crane writes in “Legend,” “drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry / Shall string some constant harmony” (3), echoing the ideal of poetic piquancy in “The Wine Menagerie.” “Mustard scansions of the eyes” is a figure for an imaginative fertility of the eye, for a poetic power paralleled by the leopard’s erotic ferocity. In this way, Crane eroticizes poetic power by making it animal. The poem moves from the eye of the drinker to the array of anthropomorphic bottles that confront the drinker from behind the bar as so many desired bodies: Then glozening decanters that reflect the street Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow Applause flows into liquid cynosures: —I am conscripted to their shadows’ glow. (23)

The curved surfaces of the wine bottles are imagined as bellies, the jumble of refracted images playing over them as clothes worn by the bottles-bodies. These bottles are rendered with two more of Crane’s “non-naming” figures: “glozening decanters” and “liquid cynosures.” The first thing one tends to perceive about “glozening” is that it is a substitution for the more familiar word “glistening.” It is clear that Crane intends to evoke “glistening” because he changes the standard form of the archaic term “glozing” into “glozening” so as to encourage the association. “Glozening” is Crane’s figure for the way drunkenness clothes the external world, what’s perceived, in a glossy sheen that renders reality into a pleasing lie for the eye; the inebriate perceives a shine in reality he wouldn’t normally see. We expect this glossy, or glozed, reality to please the eye, just as glozed speech pleases the ear with its flattery, but the initial consequence of the glozing seems quite unflattering, since the hostility of the encounter in stanza three amounts to a de-idealized image of eroticism. On the other hand, when the “new anatomies” are reached in

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stanza seven, the glozing seems to have indeed created something pleasing to the speaker. The question remains whether we are meant to consider this a transient illusion bestowed by the deceptive powers of alcohol, or whether glozing is authentic, no matter how evanescent. The verb “to gloze” has two primary significations. As an alternative form of the verb “to gloss,” it means to explain or comment upon, usually with reference to a text. It also refers to language that flatters or deceives. Glozing and glossing have historically carried pejorative inflections, what the OED terms “a sinister sense: a sophistical or disingenuous interpretation.” Crane seems to have the etymology of “gloze” in mind as well, since it points toward his belief that authentic poetic language is incarnational. According to the OED, the Latin “glossa” originally signified a word needing explanation. In later usage, the term indicates the explanation itself. Crane’s figure evokes this etymology by referring to the act of interpretation with a nonce word that is itself in need of interpretation. Crane may also have been aware that the Greek word from which the Latin derives means, according to the OED, “tongue, hence language, foreign language, a foreign or obscure word.” Crane has put a tongue, as it were, into the wine bottles, endowing them with speech. When one chooses to symbolize language as a tongue, which the coinage “glozening” does implicitly, one conceives of language as a physiological phenomenon. The second “non-naming” figure for the wine bottles is “liquid cynosures.” The Cynosure is the Pole Star; by analogy, any guiding star or light; and by further analogy, any brilliant object that is the center of attention. Because the wine bottles reflect light, it seems reasonable to identify them as one of the tenors of this vehicle for brightness. They are also the eyes themselves, and by extension the body. If “liquid cynosures” stand in for the bottles, and the bottles figure bodies, then these cynosures are bodies once removed. The liquidity of the wine corresponds to the moisture of the eye, as well as to the host of body fluids soon to come as the poem proceeds. Assent to the wine flows from the bottles into the eyes and the body. Wine flowing out of the bottles is a figure both for the way intoxication washes over the body and the way hallucinatory images rise before the eyes. Crane is after the intoxicating sensation of flowing across boundaries, the crossing of corporeal limits in eroticism, and the crossing of linguistic limits through his poetics of difficulty. When these limits are transgressed, one contaminates oneself with a taboo; one is marked, or “conscripted,” by the act of transgression. At this point in the poem, the stigmatic marking of the body is not made explicit; we can only read it if we consider it valid to read “conscripted” in terms of its etymology. But once we come to the crisis moment of the poem in which the

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speaker is transfixed by “poor streaked bodies” and their “stigma,” it is clear that the etymological sense of the word is very much operative. The reflective surface of the bottles gives way, in stanza three, to another surface that serves as a screen upon which is displayed distorted images of bodies, in this case bodies quite explicitly engaged in some kind of erotic encounter: Against the imitation onyx wainscoting (Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure) Regard the forceps of the smile that takes her. Percussive sweat is spreading to his hair. Mallets, Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world . . . (23)

We come to the supercilious “regard” after the double deferment of the subordinating first line and the lengthy parenthesis. This perspective of one who “regards” suggests that the speaker possesses an analytical precision that resembles Gourmont’s position as the aloof naturalist observing the mating habits of a curious species of insect. The main event, the mating ritual, is deferred in order for the speaker to note the medium in which the coupling occurs, “imitation onyx” which is itself composed of a curious “emulsion.” Crane’s depiction of the woman is stripped down to two details. In addition to presenting her reaction to the man’s smile, Crane compares her eyes to “mallets” that “unmake an instant of the world.” Both tenor and vehicle in the mallet/eye metaphor are isolated by pronounced caesuras, thus foregrounding the eyes. The strange originality of this catachrestic figure also fixes the reader’s attention on the woman’s eyes. Eyes and mallets are not alike, since eyes neither hammer in order to join two objects, nor produce the sound of a drum. Yet Crane names the quality of an eye inflamed by sexual desire by blending its perceptual powers with characteristics of two different kinds of “mallets”: the force of a hammer, which reflects the potential of such an eye to inflict pain, and the rhythmic insistency of a drumbeat. This figure points toward Crane’s attraction to drumming, which Yingling calls his “favorite ritualistic metaphor for passion” (88), a figure he also introduces when he calls the man’s sweat “Percussive.” The woman responds boldly to the man’s erotic aggression with an equally aggressive stare that “unmake[s] an instant of the world.” But this is the speaker’s world, not the man’s. The speaker, observing the encounter, reacts to the aggression he sees in the woman’s eyes with the withdrawal

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suggested by the ellipses, a turning inward to a fantastic landscape of the Id populated by symbolic serpents, masked eyes, muffled sounds, and phallic arrows: What is it in this heap the serpent pries— Whose skin, facsimile of time, unskeins Octagon, sapphire transepts round the eyes; —From whom some whispered carillon assures Speed to the arrow into feathered skies? (23)

Rather than piercing the human body, Cupid’s arrow thrusts into “feathered skies,” a figure that likens the sky to the bodies of the birds that occupy it. The arrow joins serpent and bird, body and spirit, and the exchange is marked by a kind of cry, a “whispered carillon.” The next stanza of “The Wine Menagerie,” the one in which Crane unveils the erotic body as the site of ritual purification, is even more complex than my earlier discussion allows. If we enlarge our focus to take in the entire stanza, we discover that in addition to magically undoing the sexual taboo, corporeal coupling both brings individuals radically together and, paradoxically, drives them implacably apart: Each chamber, transept, coins some squint, Remorseless line, minting their separate wills— Poor streaked bodies wreathing up and out, Unwitting the stigma that each turn repeals: Between black tusks the roses shine! (23)

Bodies are mingled, but they do not return to unity, the loss of which Aristophanes posits as the source of desire in the famous fable of love he recites in The Symposium, a text with which Crane was very familiar.40 Eroticism creates instead a “remorseless line” between lovers, producing “separate wills” as if stamping out self-contained coins to be bartered in the de-idealized landscape of erotic exchange the speaker observes in the bar, where the man’s “forceps” “takes” a woman and she retaliates with the “mallets” of her eyes. “Chamber” and “transept” are spatial, architectural figures for the human body as a menagerie-like structure of containment, a structure harboring recessive “rooms” in which hidden qualities are stored away. These are chambers of the mind, images of the unconscious echoed by the other peripheral spaces and architectural dividers that fill the poem: the “alcove of her jealousy,” the “octagon, sapphire transepts,” the “wainscoting,” “thresholds,”

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“windowpane,” and, finally, the ominous “wall” behind which the speaker imagines the floating heads of John the Baptist and Holofernes. “Chamber” and transept” are appositional equivalents for a room or container of one sort or another, but in the same kind of grammatical shifting practiced on “unwitting” and (in “Voyages IV”) “still exclaim receive,” Crane is also using “transept” as a past participle signifying “crossed” or “bridged.” Calling upon the Latin etymology of transept as the combination of trans (across or beyond) and septum (a hedge, fence, or any enclosure), Crane figures the erotic coming together of two bodies as a line traversing the boundaries of two “chambers,” each “transept” by the other. Rather than interpenetrating, however, the bodies diverge from one another. Crane postpones the interpenetration of boundaries until the following stanza, after the repeal of the sexual stigma: New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons Build freedom up about me and distill This competence—to travel in a tear Sparkling alone, within another’s will. (24)

Even this ecstatic moment of freedom, however, is qualified. The speaker does not claim to have crossed all thresholds, only to have come upon new ones; the “anatomies” may be bodies purified of the sexual stigma, but they remain bodies with boundaries of their own. The speaker’s claim to have given himself over entirely to “another’s will” is also qualified by the solitude in which he nevertheless remains, “sparkling alone.” And, as many commentators have noted of this much-discussed quatrain, the liberating effect of wine is undercut by the sense that it is an imprisoning force, holding one firmly in its threatening “talons.” As the drinker asserts at the outset of his inebriation, he is “conscripted to their shadows glow,” to the mesmerizing presence of the wine bottles arrayed before him. Crane’s menagerie is disguised by the fact that its animals are, for the most part, present only as fragmentary forms. Three animals are easy to spot, since they appear by name: the leopard, the serpent, and the urchin. Others of less certain identity appear in the form of four metonymies: feathers, a pair of black tusks, talons, and a shell. One denizen of the menagerie is, of course, the human animal itself, which also appears in the form of metonymies, parts of the body so dismembered from the whole that their human designations are indistinguishable from the parts of some other animal’s body. In this class fall most of the poem’s terms for the body. They are: the eye, the brow, the belly, the mouth (in the form of a smile), the hair, the skin, the face, the

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tongue, the tooth, the shins, the head, and the back. There remains the one part of the body traditionally identified as the organ of love: the heart. It’s there in Crane’s menagerie as well, disguised under a “valentine,” “Petrushka’s valentine pivot[ing] on its pin.” Listing things in this manner does some violence to the poem, but it clarifies the way in which Gourmont and Crane represent the human body in a manner calculated to accentuate its animality, which both of them do in order to expose the hidden significance of eroticism. Bataille speculates that animals embody this secrecy because of the taboo that separates human and animal spheres: As soon as human beings give rein to animal nature in some way we enter the world of transgression forming the synthesis between animal nature and humanity through the persistence of the taboo; we enter a sacred world, a world of holy things. (84)

One crucial dimension to Crane’s figuration of the body in “The Wine Menagerie” is the prominence he gives to the margins of the body. This aspect of the body is manifested in the poem by several secretions. There is, first of all, the serpent that “unskeins,” or secretes, its skin in the psychedelic form of “octagon, sapphire transepts.” There is also the familiar trio of body fluids: blood, sweat, and tears. The poetic speaker reports that his “blood dreams a receptive smile,” and he notes the “percussive sweat” “spreading” to the “hair” of the man in the bar. The speaker’s inebriated state also permits him, at one point, “to travel in a tear.” The other body fluid in the poem is bile, a slightly less familiar substance secreted by the liver and believed, in ancient and medieval physiology, to be the humour responsible for irascibility and melancholy. In “The Wine Menagerie” it appears as a figure for the future poems about erotic conflict that the speaker exhorts himself to compose, recognizing, however, that poems, although invested with the “frozen billows of [his] skill,” will fail to compensate for loss and death. “Invent,” he intones, “new dominoes of love and bile,” and then trails off into a discouraged ellipsis. Products of the body similar in type to these fluids show up as well in Crane’s elaborate figure for the “imitation onyx wainscoting” of the bar. The speaker’s perception of this surface is conveyed parenthetically, as if it were a secret whispered in an aside to the audience: “(Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure)” (23). All the emulsion’s components are organic substances; except for the snow, they are products of the body that traverse the body’s boundaries, eggs and manure flowing from either humans or animals, yarn composed of material emanating from the surface of an animal’s

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body. Anecdotal evidence that Crane considered using the word “shit” in place of manure (Unterecker 404) suggests that in choosing manure, Crane sought to underline, once again, the animality of a body product shared in common by humans and animals. Coal, of course, is neither human nor animal; it is carbonized vegetable matter, a product of the vegetable body. This emphasis on the periphery of the body points toward a reading of the poem as a rite of purification, a purification that proceeds by way of defilement. Mary Douglas argues that the margins of the body are “invested with power and danger” because, like the margins of any structure, when “they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.” For the body in particular, she continues, the orifices . . . symbolize its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have body parings, skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat. (121)

“The Wine Menagerie,” pervaded by precisely such “marginal stuff,” is a poem about the “power and danger” residing in the thresholds that both divide and conjoin sobriety and drunkenness, one body and another, humans and animals. The menagerie holds contradictory meanings. On the one hand, it suggests the forces of social propriety that confine the “natural” activity of the uninhibited, eroticized human body. But it also suggests that the animality of human eroticism, the instinctual dimension of human behavior, is itself cage-like insofar as it imposes limits on the autonomy of the self. Eroticism and its analogue, drunkenness, are, in this view, paradoxical forces that ultimately block access to the sublimity toward which they point. In that very paradox, however, Crane discovers authenticity. “Let my lusts be my ruin,” as he writes to Wilber Underwood, “since all else is a fake and mockery” (261).

Chapter Two

Morton Minsky Reads The Bridge: “National Winter Garden” and the Meaning of Burlesque

If you love us, please don’t mind If now and then we bump and grind! We will shimmy and we will shake But please don’t think we’re on the make! —Chorus, Minsky’s Burlesque

Hart Crane readers turn up in unlikely places. Morton Minsky, for instance, recalls Crane several times in Minsky’s Burlesque, his memoir of the years between 1912 and 1937 when he and his brothers ran several of New York’s most celebrated burlesque theaters. In the course of boasting about the cultural highbrows who frequented their National Winter Garden theater at Houston Street and Second Avenue during the 1920s, he focuses on Crane and the “National Winter Garden” section of The Bridge: Those were boom days. Who cared for money! As I said, we were getting a pretty classy clientele. Regulars at that time included the publishers Condé Nast and Frank Crowinshield, the writers John Erskine and John Dos Passos, the columnists Walter Winchell and Mark Hellinger. Such distinguished commentators as Robert Benchley, Irvin S. Cobb, and George Jean Nathan were loyal attenders, as was a shy poet named Hart Crane, who wrote this poem in our honor[.]

After quoting the beginning of “National Winter Garden,” Minsky comments: That’s a poem, right? But while “legs were wakening salads” in Hart Crane’s brain, the women backstage were even more earthy than the poet’s visions of them. (71–2)

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The high spirits and reckless drinking for which Crane was so well-known jar harshly with Minsky’s “shy poet” epithet. Yet this stereotypical view of “The Poet” is itself revealing, since it reflects the same assumptions about cultural hierarchies that have led most critics to overlook or misconstrue this poem from “Three Songs,” the fifth of The Bridge’s eight sections. Even when attention is given to “National Winter Garden,” it is almost always read as an unsympathetic portrayal of a vulgar form of popular entertainment that signals modern America’s cultural degeneration.1 Minsky’s observations suggest, however, that this episode from The Bridge needs to be re-examined in light of two contextual factors: the biographical evidence of Crane’s unequivocal enthusiasm for burlesque, and the debates about popular culture and obscenity that were provoked by burlesque when it turned to increasingly explicit displays of women’s bodies during the 1920s. Crane’s depiction of burlesque as seen through the eyes of a burlesque impresario is intriguing on several counts. It offers, first of all, a striking display of how cultural categories of “high” and “low” jostle one another when they come into direct contact. On the one hand, Minsky is clearly proud that his theater has inspired such a “classy” thing as poetry, a genre that virtually defines the kind of high culture produced by “shy” artists who feel, he presumes, ill at ease in the rough and tumble world of burlesque. Like the names of the “pretty classy clientele” he parades before us, poetry elevates the National Winter Garden (and himself ) above its (and his) disreputable cultural station. Even so, he is not bashful about playing the critic, making the judgment that Crane’s poem idealizes the real-life “earthiness” of the burlesque milieu. In Minsky’s view, the “poet’s visions” may enable him to invent the unusual locution “legs waken salads in the brain,” but they misrepresent burlesque because they do not truly convey the sexuality of the performers, which he alludes to euphemistically as their “earthy” qualities. In order to drive this point home, Minsky resorts to the tools of his trade. His remark immediately following the quoted lines is, in effect, a burlesque of the poem: “That’s a poem, right?” It isn’t hard to imagine him chewing on his cigar to the appropriate musical accompaniment: Da-dum-dum! Minsky’s appreciative words, with their gentle touch of mockery, betray the ambivalence with which he implicitly accepts the stratification of culture into high and low domains. Returning Crane’s upward translation of burlesque back to the world of low comedy, the impresario inverts this hierarchy and reasserts the cultural validity of a genre many consider ignoble. In “National Winter Garden,” Crane executes a very similar reversal, although I’m not sure Mr. Minsky would recognize the gesture.

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Morton Minsky may have been ambivalent about turning burlesque into literature, but he never doubts that Crane’s poem is a tribute to his theater. By contrast, the critical neglect of “National Winter Garden” appears to stem from an antipathy for burlesque based in part on rigidly observed demarcations between high and low culture. R. W. B. Lewis, for instance, signals his distaste for the poem by giving its “overwhelmingly repellent” images of sexuality only abbreviated treatment, asserting that “a detailed gloss would only emphasize the obvious” (344). Although Lewis’s reading is cursory, the pejorative view of burlesque on which it is premised comes across in his interpretation of the title, “National Winter Garden,” as a pun signifying that the “national scene and culture are . . . buried in the depths of winter” (343). Sherman Paul offers a similar perspective. He argues that Crane dramatizes cultural decline in The Bridge, which he terms the “modern lapse from the erotic universe represented in vegetative myth” (248), by contrasting the burlesque dancers with Pocahontas, who appears in “The Dance” section as an American earth-goddess. In Hart Crane and The Homosexual Text, one of the few recent Crane studies that even bothers to comment on “National Winter Garden,” Thomas Yingling places less stress on the issue of cultural degeneration, but he, too, considers Crane’s poem a critique of the burlesque genre. Overplaying Crane’s empathy for the stripper, Yingling credits him with a more feminist outlook than the biographical record supports, leading him to argue that the poem is a “scathing rebuke” of the “position of Woman in a sexist society” (217). To see Crane clearly, however, we need to avoid glossing over the hostility toward women he sometimes displays. As he proclaims in a 1922 letter to his boyhood friend William Wright, “woman was not meant to occupy [a] position” of sexual control, since this “produc[es] very debilitating and thoroughly unprofitable effects on gentlemen who put themselves too much in their hands” (82).2 Informed by a pre-existing animus against burlesque, these readings are not entirely unreasonable, since they respond to the disturbing vision of sexuality at the heart of the poem. “National Winter Garden” runs a mere twenty-eight lines, a brief interlude among the fifteen poems and over 1200 lines out of which The Bridge is composed. In a taxonomy of eroticism in The Bridge, however, it occupies an exceptional position as the work’s most direct confrontation with the eroticized human body. “National Winter Garden” is the central panel in the triptych of poems that constitutes the “Three Songs” section. As others have noted, the section considers three avatars of woman as archetype: mother, whore, virgin—or, as Crane names them in “Southern Cross” (the first “song”), “Eve! Magdalene! / or Mary, you?” (87). In “Virginia,” the last “song,” Mary is a Manhattan office worker,

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inaccessible in her “way-up nickel-dime tower,” and the nearest we come to the erotic are “green figs” that “gleam / By oyster shells” (90). “Southern Cross” is more closely linked to the motifs of “National Winter Garden.” Gazing up at the night sky, its speaker muses upon the frustrations bred by desire as he watches a kind of celestial disrobing. Anticipating the burlesque scenario, Crane figures the emergence of a constellation as a striptease in which “The Southern Cross takes night / And lifts her girdles from her, one by one” (87). The goddess in this poem remains, however, a disembodied presence. Although the speaker longs to possess the “nameless Woman of the South” as “No wraith, but utterly,” he is left with “vaporous scars” and “Eve—wraith of my unloved seed” (88). The speaker of “Southern Cross” pines for a “simian Venus” (87), but it is only in the more earthly striptease of “National Winter Garden” that Crane actually delivers the goods. Of these three “songs,” “National Winter Garden” has the tightest prosodic format, cast in the rhyming quatrains that Crane typically reserves for heightened moments, as in the final portion of “The River,” the dedicatory “To Brooklyn Bridge,” and the entirety of “The Dance,” the climax of the recuperative journey to the pre-Columbian origins of America. Crane accentuates this sense of control by rigorously maintaining both the abcb rhyme scheme and the stanzaic integrity of the seven quatrains, never once enjambing across stanzas. These formal patterns contribute to the sense that Crane views the performance as a ritual event. Although the poem as a whole is written in pentameter, the initial quatrain is framed by two tetrameter lines, giving it a more constricted, jittery feel by which the reader is abruptly brought into contact with the bracing eroticism of the scene: Outspoken buttocks in pink beads Invite the necessary cloudy clinch Of bandy eyes . . . No extra mufflings here: The world’s one flagrant, sweating cinch. (89)

As in “The Wine Menagerie,” written less than a year before “National Winter Garden,” Crane turns to a theriomorphic language in order to convey the animality of human eroticism.3 Referring to the stripper’s G-string as a “sweating cinch,” he likens this garment of sexual exhibitionism to a saddlegirth. In addition to bestializing the stripper’s genitals, the figure draws on the slang meaning of “cinch” as a “sure thing” to convey the cocky possessiveness with which the male spectators savor their voyeuristic pleasures. The poem reaches climax just as the stripper reaches hers, in an act deemed the

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“cheapest echo of them all” (89). Here, in stanzas five and six, the animality of the body achieves its zenith: Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats, Pearls whip her hips, a drench of whirling strands. Her silly snake rings begin to mount, surmount Each other—turquoise fakes on tinselled hands. We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed, —All but her belly buried in the floor; And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat! We flee her spasm through a fleshless door. . . . (89)

Crane piles on the tawdriness, situating the reader among an audience entranced, yet also repulsed, by the convulsive movements of a woman’s body that swivels like a machine, brandishes animalistic “teats,” and adorns itself with “silly” accoutrements of bad taste. Bringing “mount” and “surmount” into close proximity, Crane matches the tasteless bawdiness of the dancer with an egregious pun that equates the bestial copulation of “mounting” with the transcendent soaring of “surmounting.” This grotesque sexual bestiary is garnished with tokens of bogus finery—“fake” jewels, “tinselled hands”—pressing us to see the striptease as the “cheapest echo” of eroticism imaginable. Yet the impulse to “flee” before this tableau is in fact a prelude to the abrupt reversal of the concluding stanza: Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh, O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone. Then you, the burlesque of our lust—and faith, Lug us back lifeward—bone by infant bone. (89)

In the last of several voice changes that I examine further on, the hard-boiled voice of the burlesque-hall habitué gives way to a more aloof speaker who reevaluates the corporeal spectacle, elevating it into a ritual of rebirth and drawing a typological parallel between the anonymous stripper and Mary Magdalene. Just as Magdalene undergoes metamorphosis from corrupt prostitute to holy saint, the defiled body of the stripper retains its value as ritual purifier. And just as Magdalene, singled out in the Gospels as the first to witness the resurrected Christ, is the midwife of rebirth, so the stripper “lug[s] us back lifeward.” Presiding over this arduous “lugging” of the audience back

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to life, the stripper is accorded regenerative powers that facilitate purification via a recuperation of the body’s animality. Moreover, manuscripts show that Crane’s extensive revisions to this final stanza tend to shift rhetorical emphasis away from death and toward rebirth. Among other alterations, Crane replaced Astarte, the Phoenician fertility goddess, with Magdalene, choosing to ground his ritualization of burlesque in a specifically Christian drama of sin and redemption. While Astarte is also associated with myths of resurrection, she less readily suggests Magdalene’s transmutation from sexual corruption to spiritual purity, and she fails to convey the notion that witnessing itself may engender purification, as it does in both Magdalene’s role in the Resurrection and Crane’s representation of the burlesque scenario.4 This striking turnabout from vulgarity to purity has not been wellaccounted for in the secondary literature. With the exception of Paul Giles, critics have assumed that the negativity of the first six stanzas coincides with the poet’s distaste for these grotesque erotic spectacles. Yet when the evidence of Crane’s enthusiasm for burlesque is taken into consideration (detailed below), Morton Minsky’s belief that the poem is written in “honor” of his theater seems defensible. Minsky’s casual assertion points toward a new view of the poem based on a question unasked by most critical readings because they begin by assuming they already know the answer: is Crane picturing the burlesque scenario in order to dramatize cultural decay, or does this public spectacle of eroticism represent for Crane a form of popular culture akin to ritual that exalts the body’s animality, specifically because it displays the body as a defiled object? In addition to the close readings that follow, I address this question by situating Crane’s appropriation of the striptease within the controversies over obscenity and cultural hierarchies prompted by burlesque during the 1920s. Moral reformers and guardians of high culture had periodically conducted campaigns against burlesque ever since it became linked to the display of women’s bodies in the 1860s (Allen 107). The vogue for burlesque among Minsky’s “classy clientele” coincides, however, with a singular turning point in the genre’s evolution. Crane caught burlesque right on the cusp of its transformation from a hybrid theatrical entertainment of the nineteenth century, combining elements of vaudeville, minstrelsy, and female spectacle, into the forerunner of the pornographic genre familiar to us today. The striptease, which we now think of as synonymous with burlesque, did not begin to dominate performances until precisely these years of the mid-1920s. As the nudity featured in the shows grew more daring, their popularity soared. In reaction, both attempts to curb them and voices raised in their defense grew more

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numerous.5 If, on the one hand, burlesque in this period represented—in Alan Trachtenberg’s words—“the very definition of the low” (xii), it also served as a cultural flash point, eliciting a lively dialogue about eroticism in the arts and the relation between popular and high culture among many commentators, including E. E. Cummings, Edmund Wilson, and Gilbert Seldes. In several essays written for Vanity Fair and The Dial in 1925 and 1926, Cummings establishes himself as one of burlesque’s most impassioned champions, singling out the National Winter Garden as “a singularly fundamental institution” (144). Much of Cummings’s energy is directed toward undermining the same prejudice against burlesque that prevails in most critical readings of Crane’s poem. Cummings asks his readers to “assume (for the nonce) that burlesk is an art” (126). Determined to persuade us that Minsky’s theater provides even greater “aesthetic emotion” than Cézanne’s Mount Sainte-Victoire, Cummings treats burlesque as a form of “modern art” akin to the “‘ultramodernistic’ music of Arnold Schoenberg” and Igor Stravinsky (127–9). Coupled with these extravagant claims, however, is a somewhat defensive attempt to defuse the opposing conviction that these spectacles are “distinctly inartistic and frankly lowbrow affairs” (129). Cummings proceeds by drawing a distinction between two classes of burlesque: There are “burlesque shows” and this is thanks to the supporters of the National Winter Garden, Burlesk. But, granted that—on the surface— no two things could possibly seem more incompatible than burlesk (the original undiluted article) and “Art,” this is important only as proving how little “cultured” people observe for themselves and how consistently they are duped by preconceived notions. Should my readers take the trouble to examine, not conventional or academic “art,” but “modern” (also called “primitive”) art—art of today, art which is alive—they will discover that, in ridiculing the aesthetic significance of burlesk with a k, they are talking through their hats. (129)

The profusion of bracketed terms Cummings invokes in this spirited defense points toward the contradiction at the root of his position. He disdains the “preconceived notions” behind such conventional labels as “Burlesque shows,” “Art,” and “cultured” people. Yet at the same time he chooses both to rely on them and to invent still another: “burlesk with a k.” Although he attacks the traditional scheme in which burlesque sits at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy, he resorts to an analogous hierarchy that valorizes “burlesk” as authentic (“original,” “undiluted”), and derides mere “burlesque” as a

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less legitimate genre. Intent on elevating burlesque onto the same level as the “fine arts,” Cummings thus remains committed to a firm distinction between the high and the low. In addition to championing burlesque for its authenticity, Cummings sees burlesque’s popularity as a vindication of modernism against the charge of elitism. What is particularly striking is the way he treats the defense of burlesque and modernism as congruent polemics: The fact that this highly stylized, inherently “abstract,” positively “futuristic” art known to its devotees as burlesk is indubitably for the masses, knocks into a cocked chapeau the complaint of many so-called “critics” that “modern art” is “neurotic,” “unhealthy,” “insane,” “arbitrary,” “unessential,” “superficial” and “not for the masses.” (130)

These remarks suggest that burlesque appealed to artists and writers during the 1920s because it filled their need to find forms of popular culture that incarnated the same values of authenticity that they sought to convey in their own work. Like jazz, burlesque seemed to effect a reconciliation between the elitist and populist impulses of modernism. Finally, Cummings’s explanation of the “essence of burlesk” resonates with the carefully orchestrated reversals that distinguish Crane’s poem. Confounding the conventional view, Cummings claims (somewhat disingenuously) that traditional media like painting, sculpture, and theater are circumscribed by their inability to depict the contradictory nature of reality: “a thing or character cannot possibly be presented as beautiful, noble, or desirable and also as ugly, ignoble and despicable” (126). Because burlesque, by contrast, is unhampered by this limitation, “opposites occur together,” enabling us to “know around a thing” (127). To clarify this point, Cummings draws an analogy between burlesque’s capacity to communicate contraries and a theory holding that opposite phenomena were originally signified by the same word: A certain very wise man has pointed out (in connection with the meaning of dreams) that what “weak” means and what “strong” means were once upon a time meant by one word. To understand this, it is quite unnecessary for us to try to imagine ourselves bloodthirsty savages of the forest primeval, or even to become psychoanalysts. All we have to do is observe closely something which is flourishing under our very noses, today—the art of burlesk. (127)

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This is probably an allusion to the passage in The Interpretation of Dreams in which Freud enlists philological evidence for the “antithetical meaning of primal words” as corroboration for his analysis of the way dreams turn things into their opposites (353).6 The important thing for a reading of “National Winter Garden” is that Cummings, with characteristic lightheartedness, assigns to burlesque a set of qualities that lend it the cachet of modernism, allying it with such fashionable topics as psychoanalysis, ethnography, and the primitive origins of language. I do not mean to suggest that Crane’s view of burlesque coincides in any precise way with the one Cummings elaborates in these essays, or that the New York literati was uniformly receptive to burlesque. Yet as Crane’s friend Susan Jenkins Brown points out in her memoir, Minsky’s hall was “popularized in our circle” by none other than Cummings himself (58). We can deduce Crane’s perspective only on the basis of the enthusiasm he expresses in his letters, and on a reading of “National Winter Garden.” It is nonetheless striking that Crane, too, wrote an essay on burlesque in March, 1926, only three months after Cummings’s appeared in print. According to John Unterecker, Crane submitted the essay to Vanity Fair, but the magazine declined to publish and the manuscript has never been located (427). While it is thus impossible to know whether or not Crane wished to differ with his friend, there is no question that he sought to emulate Cummings as an interpreter of burlesque shortly before the writing of “National Winter Garden” five months later. While Cummings labors to elevate burlesque to the ranks of the fine arts, Edmund Wilson celebrates the shows precisely because they are “admittedly as vulgar as possible” (274). Wilson’s preference for the National Winter Garden over the more stylized exhibition of female nudity featured in Ziegfeld’s Follies stems from the more “primitive” tenor of downtown burlesque: Though more ribald, it is more honest and less self-conscious than the ordinary risqué farce and, though crude, on the whole more attractive than most of the hideous comic-supplement humors of uptown revue and vaudeville. . .the Minsky brothers go in for a kind of beauty which has long passed out of fashion elsewhere. The National Winter Garden has no use for the slim legs and shallow breasts the modern American taste for which has been so successfully exploited by Ziegfeld and the other uptown producers. (274–5)

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The Houston street variety appeals to Wilson for both the crudity of its comedy routines, which he calls “East Side folk-drama” (276), and because it hearkens back to the oversized women who had commanded the stage during the late nineteenth century. As Robert Allen points out, during the 1920s female nudity was tolerated in the Follies more readily than in burlesque because the Follies featured the “wholesome sexuality of the white middle-class girl next door, not the wild, potentially destructive sexuality of the amazon” (246). This shift, from what Allen calls the “working-class sexuality” of burlesque to the “cosmopolitan worldliness of Paris” (245) on display in Ziegfeld’s productions, reflects a longterm evolution in female spectacle. Allen details the gradual disappearance from the burlesque stage of unruly women who had, in the nineteenth century, delivered caustic dialogue in addition to flaunting their sexuality. By the early 1900s, these speaking roles were usurped by male comedians, and the women played a largely silent part in the spectacle of female sexuality.7 In his preference for the more aggressive sexuality of burlesque, Wilson is at odds with Gilbert Seldes, one of the pioneers in the study of popular culture. In 1924, Seldes caused a stir by attacking “the grading of the arts” that relegates to a “lower table” (3) such manifestations of popular culture as the Krazy Kat comic strip and Irving Berlin’s songs. One of the “lively arts” he singles out for praise is the revue, devoting an entire chapter of The 7 Lively Arts to the “genius” of Florenz Ziegfeld. This appraisal of the Follies depends in large part on its contrast with burlesque, which he does not particularly care for. Even Seldes, however, feels compelled to praise burlesque’s “complete lack of sentimentality” (251). In response to charges that “the Follies are frigid,” he declares that they intend to be “Apollonic, not Dionysian.” Alluding to burlesque, which he finds less accomplished, he advises that “when we want the true frenzy we have to go elsewhere” (137). But if we desire female spectacle that “pleases the mind” as well as “the eye, the ear, and the pulse,” we will find it in Ziegfeld’s “mania for perfection” that “touches upon art” (133–34). Crane, however, situates his poem in the cruder setting of Minsky’s hall, not Ziegfeld’s theater, for the ritual he stages requires the same contact with the “low” that arouses Wilson and Cummings. Like so many other writers and artists of the 1920s, Crane wanted “the true frenzy.” As Rachel Shteir puts it in her history of striptease, Minsky’s burlesque was distinctive because it offered a “unique mix of rawness and redemption” (103). EROTICISM PURE AND IMPURE Deciding whether burlesque stands for decline or renewal raises the larger matter of Crane’s representation of the eroticized human body in The Bridge.

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The long poem Crane worked on between 1923 and 1930 is much preoccupied with love as a contradictory force. Love in The Bridge swings between the extremes of the pure and the tainted, between its representation as the “white pervasive, Paradigm” (106) of “Atlantis” on the one hand, and, on the other, its lowly, scatological counterpart in “The Tunnel,” where it is called—in a coded reference to anonymous gay sexual encounters—“a burnt match skating in a urinal” (99).8 Like the shorter poems of erotic crisis from White Buildings, The Bridge links sexuality to the appetite for linguistic purity that animates so much of modern poetry. As I argue in Chapter One, Mary Douglas’s anthropological analysis of purification rituals may be applied to a reading of Crane’s erotic lyrics. Arguing that purity always exists in dialectical relation to defilement, Douglas asserts that things are not in themselves dirty, that dirt is a “residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications” (36). Unclean things thus serve the ritual function of purification. In Douglas’s view, power resides in the ritual incorporation of that which has been designated anomalous by a cultural system. These rituals of purification are the points at which a system acknowledges that which lies outside the system, thereby renewing and invigorating it. Applying this model to Crane, we may conceive his stylistic “difficulty” as the outgrowth of an attitude toward language as a ritual object capable of effecting purification through the presence of such linguistic anomalies as neologisms and catachresis.9 In his short poems of erotic crisis, Crane conjoins his elliptical idiom with figurations of the human body as a defiled object ritually purified by a traumatic, wounding eroticism. In The Bridge, and in “National Winter Garden” in particular, he places the eroticized body into a context of ugliness and indecency yet claims that by bearing witness to this ugliness, we may lay claim to the body as a source of renewal. Crane’s compulsion to purify leads him to seek contact with various forms of dirt because it is dirt that makes him clean. Keeping this attitude toward the impure in mind, we must be cautious about the meanings we ascribe to Crane’s portrayal of burlesque, for what drew him to these shows is precisely their unsavory aura. His penchant for burlesque is a manifestation of his generation’s vogue for the “primitive” in which various “unclean” phenomena—non-Western art, sexuality, drunkenness, the unconscious—were embraced as avatars of authenticity.10 Another source of burlesque’s appeal to Crane lies in its connection with the gay subculture of the era. As George Chauncey documents in his study of gay life in New York, burlesque theaters and their surroundings were gathering places for gay men since at least the 1890s.11 During the socalled “pansy craze” of the 1920s, gay skits became part of the repertoire at

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burlesque halls, cabarets, and revues, culminating in the 1930–31 Broadway season, when “pansy acts became the hottest in town” (314). This connection between burlesque and gay experience is quite explicit in several of Crane’s letters about Havana, where he attended burlesque shows just before and after drafting “National Winter Garden” in August 1926. These letters, which I examine below, suggest that Crane’s fondness for the burlesque milieu cannot be fully understood without taking into account the links between burlesque’s atmosphere of unconventional sexuality and the thriving gay subculture of the 1920s. One corollary of the relative neglect of “National Winter Garden” in the critical literature is that very little effort has gone into reconstructing what Crane actually experienced at burlesque shows. In addition to documenting Crane’s taste for burlesque, we need to investigate theatrical burlesque as a cultural phenomenon in order to explain an apparent incongruity between biographical and textual evidence. On the one hand, there is little doubt that Crane embraced this “low” form of entertainment. Yet the stripper in “National Winter Garden” is marked by tokens of inauthenticity, thus suggesting that she is the incarnation of cultural decline—the “cheapest echo of them all.” Keeping these contradictory perspectives in mind, I examine Crane’s appropriation of certain elements of burlesque, including the striptease; its multiple entrances and exits; its double entendres; its tinted spotlights; and one of its sexual props, the trapeze, a vestige from the circus acts that constitute just one of burlesque’s many generic sources. THE BEST ENTERTAINMENT IN NEW YORK Crane’s affinity for burlesque comes across most clearly in several letters that touch on performances he attended in New York and Havana. Writing in 1923 to the painter William Sommer, Crane voices unqualified delight for burlesque: Slater Brown . . . [has] taken me to the greatest burlesque shows down on the lower east side that you ever imagined. We went to one last night, and I so wished you were along. (They do everything but the ACT itself right on the stage, marvelous jazz songs, jokes, etc. and really the best entertainment there is in N.Y. at present.) (150)

In the face of such praise, it is hard to believe that Crane includes burlesque in The Bridge as an exhibit of cultural decay. Such a view attributes a moralistic streak to Crane that simply fails to correspond with the biographical

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record. This letter also documents that what Crane witnessed in 1923 was a form of burlesque that preceded the ascendancy of the striptease. While it is clear that Crane takes pleasure in the salaciousness of the shows, he is also stimulated by the “marvelous jazz songs, jokes, etc.” that combine to make these events so appealing. Crane’s description of a theatrical miscellany is consistent with the historical evidence that, in 1923, female nudity had not yet overshadowed other components of this hybrid form of entertainment. Within the next few years, however, it would, and the National Winter Garden would play a key role in this transformation. A few years earlier, in 1917, the Lower East Side hall had attracted attention by borrowing the Parisian innovation of the “runway,” a platform extending the stage into the orchestra, bringing the dancers so close to the audience that it could, in Morton Minsky’s words, “actually smell their perfume and hear their heavy breathing” (33).12 In what may be an apocryphal story, Minsky also claims that in the same year “one of the first stripteases” occurred on their stage when a dancer “lost her head” and “unbuttoned her bodice” at the end of an encore (34). Striptease was preceded by the “cootch” dance, which had created a scandal when performed by the legendary “Little Egypt” dancer at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.13 Even in the early-1920s, however, most striptease acts ended with a woman in flesh-colored tights. Facing competition from the emerging film industry, and from more respectable cabarets and revues like Ziegfeld’s Follies, burlesque ran into financial difficulties as the 1920s progressed. When the national burlesque franchises known as “wheels” fell apart, independent venues like the National Winter Garden turned to increasingly explicit sexual display in a bid to shore up their shrinking popularity.14 One of the defining traits of burlesque was the melange of acts that graced the stage in the course of a single evening. Minsky’s description of a typical show in 1917 conveys the frequency of scene changes. He recounts well over a dozen acts coming before the intermission alone, including an opening choral number, several comedy routines, a Puccini aria, a cootch dancer, acrobatic acts, and a “serious” dramatic skit (5–6). By the mid-1920s, some of these elements were beginning to disappear, unable to compete with the increasing demand for female nudity. As Crane’s letter indicates, however, the shows remained a composite of “girls, gags, and music” (Minsky 26). Crane appropriates the miscellaneous nature of burlesque in “National Winter Garden” by structuring the poem around a series of entrances and exits. As the poem opens, we encounter the first entrance: a chorus line of women flaunting “outspoken buttocks” that “invite” the audience’s gaze. With a touch of audacity, Crane mocks the cultural hierarchy that assigns

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burlesque to a bottom rung by focusing squarely on these “buttocks,” the body’s “bottom,” placing the “bottom” of the anatomical hierarchy at the “top” of his poem: Outspoken buttocks in pink beads Invite the necessary cloudy clinch Of bandy eyes. . . . No extra mufflings here: The world’s one flagrant, sweating cinch. And while legs waken salads in the brain You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke. Always you wait for someone else though, always— (Then rush the nearest exit through the smoke). (89)

Although these lines appear to be spoken by a member of the audience, they are governed by a mercurial subjective voice that eludes identification, in part because there is no “I” in the poem, and in part because perspective modulates from this audience member to a more removed, objective voice who interprets the burlesque scenario as a ritual of purification. In the lines above, the spectator attends first to the chorus line of alluring women, and then shifts focus to the audience of which he is part. Cast in the second person, the latter stanza represents the speaker observing either his own actions—referring to himself as “you” in a distancing gesture of self-consciousness—or the collective behavior of the audience. Crane characterizes this speaker by articulating his perception of the scene in the argot of the underworld (“cinch” and “clinch”) and with a clipped style of speech that uses sentence fragments like “no extra mufflings here.” Although these lines include intricate figurative language, they also simulate the street-wise lingo of a cynical habitué of the burlesque demimonde. This is the voice of someone like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, just the type of character one might expect to “pick [his] blonde out neatly through the smoke.”15 Just as there are “no extra mufflings” preserving the modesty of the women on stage, there are no extra words in the speech of this hard-boiled burlesque voyeur. Scarcely has the show begun, though, when Crane executes the first of several exits, as the audience member under observation bolts for the door. Placing this act in parentheses, the controlling voice of the poem appears to confide this somewhat embarrassing incident as an aside, as if admonishing us not to advertise the fact that the men in the audience are deeply unsettled by the women on stage. At this point the speaker begins to assume the “participant-observer” vantage of an anthropologist, immersed in the

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cultural milieu under study but struggling to retain enough analytic distance to “read” the ritual under observation. From this perspective, which James Clifford calls “a state of being in culture while looking at culture” (9), the speaker recognizes the repetitive structures of the performance and the reactions it elicits. He knows that this ritual of fantasized possession follows an invariable script: the men will “pick out” one of the women on display, they will “always” reject their choice, and they will “always” come back for more. The observing consciousness knows he is witnessing a ritualized narrative of unfulfillable desire. In the third quatrain, the participant-observer moves on to the next phase of the performance, anticipating both the entrance of the stripper and the final exit of the evening: Always and last, before the final ring When all the fireworks blare, begins A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin, Some cheapest echo of them all—begins. (89)

Withholding any pronouns by which to orient the reader, Crane maintains an ambiguous dual perspective, looking at the scene as both an actor in the events described and as a more objective interpreter. The participant-observer registers the familiar sounds that herald the stripper’s grand finale, “always” the final act, always “last.” Using the word “always” three times in three lines, Crane exaggerates the repetitive structures of burlesque that ally it to ritual. While the stanza looks forward to the exit indicated by the “final ring” of the performance, it also anticipates an entrance, the striptease act, which is summoned twice by the word “begins” before actually beginning in the fourth stanza: And shall we call her whiter than the snow? Sprayed first with ruby, then with emerald sheen— Least tearful and least glad (who knows her smile?) A caught slide shows her sandstone grey between. (89)

While there are neither entrances nor exits here, Crane draws attention to the intermediary status of this phase in the ritual by the idiosyncratic manner in which he uses “between,” the prepositional marker of transition. “Between” reads both as preposition and noun. As preposition, we hear the elided “her legs” at the end of the line. As noun, we hear either “genitals” or some other presumably obscene word for which “between” serves as a euphemism. The

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comic incongruity of “between” as a signifier for genitals suggest both the multiplicity and emptiness of the terms that refer to and yet avoid naming taboo parts of the body. As the dancer and her “between” assume center stage, the perspectives of the participant-observer and the rest of the audience converge in the “we” whose object of fascination is “her,” the pronoun first appearing at this juncture in the poem. This interplay between “we” and “her” governs the rest of the poem. In the penultimate quatrain, the identity between the observing consciousness and the audience reaches its height, affirmed first by the “we” who “wait that writhing pool,” and again by the “we” who “flee her spasm.” But just as the final stanza elevates the lowly stripper from a “cheap echo” into a genuine vehicle of renewal, the pronouns and their antecedents undergo subtle reversals. The second person pronominal “you” refers to an audience member in the second quatrain, but in the last stanza “you” indicates the stripper: “you, the burlesque of our lust.” Further, the audience and the participant-observer switch from their subjective position as “we” to the objective “us,” upon whom the stripper exercises her powers of purification, “lug[ging] us back lifeward.” “Her” becomes “you,” “we” become “us,” and “I” doesn’t exist at all. The dual perspective from which Crane writes the poem allows him to ventriloquize a typical spectator leering at the girls, while also appraising the situation as a ritual. Crane’s adoption of the participant-observer viewpoint bears a striking similarity to one of Edmund Wilson’s accounts of a burlesque performance. In his description, Wilson is preoccupied most of all with the impassiveness of the audience: When the leading performer begins to strip, they watch the process in silence, recalling her with timid applause when she vanishes behind the wings. Finally, she shows them her breasts, but her smile is never returned; nor is there any vibration of excitement when she has finally got down to her G-string—merely the same automatic summons . . . The truth is, I suppose, that this audience are struck by a kind of awe, as if before priestesses of Venus, in presence of these gorgeous creatures. Their decorum is not undermined by this brazenly sexual exhibition: on the contrary, it makes them solemn. They have come for the gratification that they hope to derive from these dances; but this vision of erotic ecstasy, when they see it unveiled before them—though they watch it with fascination—frightens them and renders them mute. (280–1)

Here Wilson engages in what can be seen as a kind of “sexology” of the audience. Like Crane’s speaker, he regards the manner in which female

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sexuality fascinates and “frightens” the men, and is himself mesmerized by their behavior as they “flee” through the “fleshless door” of their erotic fantasy. The final five lines of the poem trace a complex and rapid sequence of movements that blurs the distinction between entrances and exits. The most prominent exit in the poem occurs when, in their imagination, the spectators pass “through a fleshless door.” This is followed by a reversal in direction signaled by “yet,” as the audience “comes back” to Magdalene’s “empty trapeze.” But this entrance, represented as a return to one of the stage props, is quickly followed by another exit: we come back, but only “to die.” Finally, there is one more entrance yet to come, the rebirth with which the poem ends. To recapitulate this final sequence: we flee the stripper, then return to Magdalene; we leave her again as we die, and then return with Magdalene’s help as she pulls us “lifeward.” The poem closes with this final image of the audience as an “infant” reborn, making a final entrance upon the stage. Yet while birth is an entrance, it is also an exit, a separation from the maternal body. And because Crane’s infant is in the macabre guise of a dismembered skeleton, the rebirth with which the poem ends is paired ambiguously with death, yet another exit. Like these carefully orchestrated entrances and exits, the highly structured rhyme scheme of “National Winter Garden” is a manifestation of Crane’s effort to simulate the forms of burlesque. Punning rhymed couplets had been a part of burlesque since at least 1868, as in these lines from the Lydia Thompson Troupe’s repertoire: And way down in front by the footlights glow, The bald-headed men sat in the front row. They had big glasses to see all the sights Including the blondes who danced in silk tights. (qtd. in Allen 23)

As Allen details, this kind of sarcastic dialogue spoken by women was gradually replaced by the mute display of the female body, thus blunting the unsettling challenge to gender hierarchies that he argues was integral both to burlesque’s popularity through the turn of the century, and to the attacks upon it by the clergy, moral reformers, and voices of the cultural establishment. The punning couplets, however, were still standard fare at the National Winter Garden performances Crane attended. A chorus reproduced in Minsky’s memoir, in four-beat ballad meter rather than pentameter, is a good example: If you love us, please don’t mind If now and then we bump and grind!

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Although Crane chooses to rhyme alternating rather than successive lines, he retains the farcical edge of burlesque rhyming, especially in the first three stanzas. Pairing identical or nearly identical words and phrases (“Clinch” and “cinch,” “through the smoke,” “begins”), Crane’s rhymes, as many have observed, are “cheap echoes” that seem to parody literary technique in the same way that burlesque skits mock serious drama. On one level, then, Crane is inhabiting the parodic idiom of burlesque, but there is a peculiarity to the echoes in the poem that is not fully explained by viewing these rhymes as parodic. The repetition of “through the smoke,” for instance, is in fact not really a rhyme at all, but a form of parallelism known as epistrophe, the reiteration of a word or phrase at the end of lines. The poem is also marked by the recurrence of many other words that do not occupy rhyming positions. These are not, properly speaking, internal rhymes; they are doublings, in some cases triplings, of identical terms. In addition to “always” and “begins,” discussed above, these include “least,” “tom-tom,” “pearls,” “mount” paired with “surmount,” “bone,” “wait,” and “final.” One of the more disorienting repetitions in the poem is the end rhyme between “clinch” and “cinch” in the first stanza. These words sound almost the same, are spelled almost the same, but are not the same. As a pair, then, they are nearly but not quite the same as the identical end rhymes in stanzas two and three (smoke-smoke, begins-begins). Yet upon inspection, the meanings of the words converge. A clinch is any kind of fastening device that fixes something into place; a cinch is an American coinage for the girth that secures a saddle. Clinching an argument makes one’s position conclusive, a sure thing; according to the OED, cinching something is also to make certain it will happen, especially in the vernacular of the 1920s. To be sure, the words also diverge in meaning, but this only adds to the vertiginous effect on the reader. Crane may even be calling upon yet another, rarer meaning of clinch, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was used as a synonym for a pun, as Giles notes (45). By both converging and diverging on orthographic, aural, and semiotic levels, these two words generate a cognitive overload, teasing the reader with potential meanings that are finally impossible to pin down. In this way they ally the reiterative devices of poetic language with intoxication. Early on in “National Winter Garden,” Crane associates burlesque with drunkenness in the line that caught Morton Minsky’s attention: “And while legs waken salads in the brain.” The entrance motif also surfaces in this

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synaesthetic figure for burlesque’s intoxicating effect upon the audience as a wakening. Just as alcohol in “The Wine Menagerie” arouses the “leopard” of sexuality from out of the drinker’s “slumbering gaze,” the eroticized bodies of the dancers “waken salads in the brain,” stirring dormant libidinal appetites and disordering the mind. Burlesque fosters the “dérèglement” of the senses, to use the formula of Rimbaud’s that Crane embraced so enthusiastically, unleashing the irrational as an agent of creative empowerment.16 The emergence of the audience’s desires prefigures the wakening to life with which the poem ends. It also plays off the opposing image of the stripper’s prostrate body, “her pearls collapsed” and “all but her belly buried in the floor” (89). Alternating between entrances and exits, beginnings and endings, rising and falling motions of the body, the poem is balanced precariously between these contraries, just as “The Wine Menagerie” holds onto the urge for purification while recognizing the impossibility of ever achieving purity. Like alcohol, burlesque in Crane’s poem is an agent of purification that recuperates the body’s animality by defiling it, which, paradoxically, distills what Crane thought of as its essential nature. THE BODY’S INDECENT TRUTH Framed within this ritualistic sequence of entrances and exits, Crane’s depiction of the eroticized body resonates with the controversies over obscenity that helped set the tone for the arts during the 1920s. In a letter posted shortly before his burst of writing on The Bridge during the summer of 1926, Crane compares the burlesque shows he and Waldo Frank attended in Havana with the fare at Minsky’s theater: Then we went to the Alhambra, a kind of Cuban National Winter Garden Burlesque. Latin “broadness” was somewhat veiled from me as far as the dialogue went, but actions went farther than apparently even the East Side can stand. (250)

Crane knew his correspondents—Slater and Susan Brown—would appreciate this detail of his stopover in Havana, since they had savored the pleasures of burlesque on the Lower East Side in his company. In the course of cluing in his friends to the more daring sexuality of the Havana shows, Crane expresses impatience with the moral censure that burlesque faced in New York. His comment about “actions” stronger than “even the East Side can stand” is almost certainly an allusion to the April 20, 1925 police raid on the National Winter Garden, the seven-week trial that followed, and the sensational

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publicity these events precipitated, all of which brought the question of burlesque and the definition of obscenity to the forefront of public debate.17 As female nudity and the striptease became more prominent in these shows, burlesque emerged as another front in the battle between censorship and the representation of the human body during the 1920s. Discord over the frank display of the body was being provoked in various quarters, including psychoanalysis and sexology; women’s fashions; dance fads; and the publication of such avant-garde works as Ulysses. Burlesque and its turn toward nudity was just one component of this wave of corporeality and the atmosphere of censorship with which it was greeted. It is therefore not surprising that the same “social-purity” organization, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, was the main instigator of both the efforts to suppress Ulysses and the raids on burlesque theaters. The Society also took a leading role in attempts to police gay culture, orchestrating raids on gay bathhouses, bars, and other gathering places. According to Chauncey, combating homosexuality was the “personal passion” of its leader, John Sumner (146). Although there is no record of Crane’s opinion of Sumner, in a 1920 letter he does refer derisively to Sumner’s predecessor, Anthony Comstock (33). Crane was almost certainly aware that in the minds of reformers like Comstock and Sumner, burlesque, gay culture, and the uninhibited depiction of the body in literature all belonged in the same subversive category.18 The censorship of Ulysses was of particular concern for Crane, which he called a “situation terrible to think on” (73). This intolerant mood had a more direct impact on Crane’s writing than is generally recognized. As I have shown, this intolerance probably contributed to Crane’s revision of “Possessions” for book publication, from which he deleted a depiction of anal intercourse included in the poem when it first appeared in The Little Review. In addition to providing further evidence that Crane was not in the least opposed to the frank sexuality of burlesque, the letter to the Browns conveys his appreciation for what he calls the “hyper-sensual and mad” (251) ambiance of Havana, a city, as Unterecker puts it, that “would later become a place he hungered for” (439). Here is part of his effort to capture its carnivalesque flavor for the Browns: Gratings and balconies and narrow streets with plenty of whores nodding. The day of our departure a great fleet of American destroyers landed. Streets immediately became torrents of uniforms—one sailor had exactly the Chinese mustache effect that I aspire to. But no Jack Fitzin: his boat must have passed to Brooklyn—passed in the night. Taxis anywhere in town for only 20¢, but that’s about the only cheap

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feature. Great black-bushed buxom Jamaican senoritas roared laughter at us, old women hobbled up offering lottery tickets (I finally got one on a hunch). The whole town is hyper-sensual and mad—i.e. has no apparent direction, destiny, or purpose; Cummings’ paradise. I shall have to go up for a real spree sometime when cash is plentiful, meanwhile this isle is enough Eden. (250–1)

Although Crane hints that he may not consider Havana as thoroughly a “paradise” as Cummings would, he is clearly delighted with the city’s Rabelaisian exuberance. Part of its appeal lies in the exoticism of a sailor’s “Chinese mustache effect” and the “black-bushed buxom Jamaican senoritas.” But Havana in the 1920s also featured a thriving gay subculture and, in general, a tolerance for unconventional sexuality that has been compared with the “decadent” ambiance of Berlin during the same era.19 It’s not surprising, then, that Crane had plans to rendezvous there with Jack Fitzin, one of his sailor lovers.20 Crane’s attraction to Havana’s gay environment, and its links with the burlesque milieu, can be glimpsed in several other letters. In a postcard to Wilbur Underwood (with whom Crane often corresponded about gay matters), he praises Havana for its “drives by the sea and love—so ardent suave and Spanish that I shall go back again as soon the Gods permit [sic]” (“Wind-blown Flames” 363). Late in August, having written much of The Bridge, he informs his mother that he will relax in Havana, where he plans “to see a few bad shows” (HCF 509). During his stay, he writes Waldo Frank, referring both to the Alhambra, the burlesque hall to which they had gone together, and to an amorous adventure with “a young Cuban sailor” whom Crane “met one evening after the Alhambra in Park Central” (274). As these comments show, for Crane there were powerful links between the burlesque milieu and gay Havana. The letter to the Browns also hints at issues that inform Crane’s representation of eroticism in the poetry he was shortly to begin writing. Crane describes the degree of sexual explicitness as a question of “veiling,” one of the central motifs in both “National Winter Garden” and “Southern Cross.” The Havana shows are at once more and less veiled than their New York counterparts. In terms of “actions,” they are more brazen. But the degree to which burlesque’s naughty tang depends upon ribald humor seems to have been especially impressed upon Crane by this encounter with skits and songs performed in Spanish. Unable to comprehend the dialogue, Crane knew he was missing an important component of the eroticism. “Latin ‘broadness’” remains “somewhat veiled” from him, and he is clearly

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disappointed that he cannot compare this element of Cuban and American burlesque. With the exception of “The Dance,” “National Winter Garden” dwells on the body more intensely than any other section of The Bridge. Crane features the “low” parts of the body (buttocks, legs, genitals, “teats,” hips, belly), the higher regions (the brain and the eyes), and elements on the corporeal margins (sweat, a dancer’s blonde hair, tears, hands). The poem also supplies several emblems for the body as a whole, including references to flesh, bones, and the “writhing pool,” a periphrasis for the entire body of the dancer as she reaches her orgiastic climax. There are also mentions of such body movements as spasms and mounting. Finally, Crane depicts garments and other bodily adornments, such as the “cinch,” mufflings, beads, rings, pearls, and even the tinted lights that veil the dancer’s body behind “ruby” and “emerald sheen.” Given this extensive enumeration of the body, and the sexual display involved in burlesque, it is especially striking that the body remains veiled by figurative language. Although the poem depicts a striptease act, it does not in fact offer any explicit renderings of the naked body. Crane comes closest to nude imagery in his representation of the taboo body parts of the woman. We encounter the dancer’s breasts in the fifth quatrain: “Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats” (89). Crane accentuates the animality of the body in this grotesque image, but he shies away from mimetic realism, choosing instead to merge rolling eyes and twirling breasts in a surreal image of vertiginous corporeal motion. Crane also deflects language from representing the genitals directly, calling them, as we have seen, a “sandstone grey between” in stanza four. Here Crane appropriates the machinery of the burlesque stage in order to simulate the mixture of veiling and unveiling that is so central to burlesque’s erotic mystique. The audience catches a glimpse of the most forbidden region of the body because of a “caught slide,” a somewhat enigmatic phrase. Given the dance context, it seems reasonable to read “slide” as a reference to the stripper’s movements, as she slides her legs apart. “Slide” is also a term for the glissando jazz effects produced by a continuous gliding from one pitch to another, as executed, for example, by the trombone. But “slide” has a more mundane signification that was probably less obscure to readers familiar with burlesque. The color of the stage was controlled by tinted slides adjusted into place over the lights. Minsky stresses the importance of lighting effects throughout his memoir, including this account of Herbert Minsky’s early experiments: Originally he had tried using red gels on the lights too, but he decided that it made the place look too much like a brothel, so he modified the

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color to magenta, which flattered the flesh tones of the women in the show. (4)

Although Minsky uses the term “gels,” the context in which “slide” appears in the poem makes it clear that the slide is the same device. The stripper is seen in “ruby,” then “emerald” light, then momentarily “between” colors as a “slide” gets “caught” in the process of replacing one color with another. The difference between white and colored lighting had more than “aesthetic” significance. At a 1937 court hearing, John Sumner accused Abe Minsky’s New Gotham Theatre of violating Section 1140A of the New York Penal Code by “presenting a performance likely to corrupt the morals of youth and others” (Allen 248). One of the principal points of contention was whether or not the strippers had ever “worked in a white light” (Minsky 269). Morton Minsky reprints parts of the hearing transcript in which a stage electrician is questioned by the theater’s attorney: Q. What sort of lights do you use for a strip number? A. The stage lights are dark blue. Q. How about the spot? A. Usually it matches the color of the strip woman’s costume. Q. In all the years you’ve worked in burlesque theaters, have you ever known a strip woman to work in a white light? A. Never! Q. Have you ever seen a strip woman expose herself completely? A. No! (269)

As this exchange shows, performing in “white light” was equivalent to completely exposing the body, including the genitals, and thus crossing the line dividing “obscene” from acceptable spectacles. Crane’s treatment of light is analogous, since he associates colored light with veilings of the body, and white light with the ultimate unveiling. The white light reveals the most taboo region of a woman’s body as a repellent “sandstone grey between,” a rough, impenetrable, and colorless object. When unveiling the body goes

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this far, uncomfortable truths are revealed, rendering the body into an ugly thing. But it would be wrong to read this ugliness as evidence that Crane is treating burlesque as a sign of degeneracy. Crane places the eroticized body into a context of ugliness and indecency in “National Winter Garden,” yet claims that by bearing witness to this ugliness, we may lay claim to the animality of the body as a source of renewal. This embrace of the ugly and indecent is what tends to get lost in many readings of The Bridge, especially when they come to “National Winter Garden.” Crane once described Marseilles, one of his favorite places in France, in terms that reflect this exaltation of the ugly: “Marseille’s a delightful place . . . It’s dirty, vulgar, noisy, dusty—but I claims [sic] wholesome. Had a great time last Saturday visiting the whore houses with an English sailor” (407–8). There are also numerous anecdotes testifying to Crane’s fondness for indecent limericks, which he took pleasure in improvising and reciting at the appropriate occasions. Although only six of these survive, and their textual accuracy is uncertain, Unterecker’s sources lead him to believe that Crane had a “considerable store” of unpublished limericks (588). One spring evening in 1929, at the painter Pavel Tchelitchev’s Paris apartment, Crane declaimed several verses, including these two, as remembered by another guest: About the poet Burns The research worker learns That the skin of his ass Was too tender for grass. He had to use maidenhair ferns. Elizabeth Browning Barrett Was found by her maw in the garrett Placing a dime in As far as her hymen And ramming it home with a carrot. (Unterecker 588)

Malcolm Cowley also remembers one: Said the poetess Sappho of Greece, “Ah, better by far than a piece Is to have my pudenda Rubbed hard by the enda The little pink nose of my niece.”21

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I cite these in order to make it plain that Crane’s taste for burlesque is entirely consistent with a capacity for crude sexual humor not unlike the kind Eliot displays in his “King Bolo” verses.22 In Eliot’s case, however, the interest lies in the jarring discrepancy between the conservative man-of-letters literary persona and the licentiousness carefully guarded from public view. Crane’s bawdiness is not at all difficult to reconcile with his public conduct. If anything, there is always the risk of mythologizing Crane’s personal history, including his homosexuality, into a cautionary parable of romantic overreaching. One of the most persuasive facets of Yingling’s book is its argument that when Crane’s acquaintances—especially Tate and Winters—evaluated his poetry as a “failure,” they were often passing judgment on his self-destructive behavior, which for them was indistinguishable from his homosexuality. Perhaps because Crane’s readers have felt compelled to rescue his poetry from being read only in terms of the sensational aspects of his life, the role of sexuality in his poems has been misconstrued. The gay studies approach to Crane has begun to remedy this, but even among these readers there is a tendency to turn away from the darker side of Crane’s vision of human eroticism. Yingling’s reading of “National Winter Garden” as a feminist critique of burlesque exemplifies this shortcoming, because it fails to recognize that Crane strives not to overcome impurity, but to hold purity and impurity in dialectical tension. Crane’s limericks amplify the grounds for my reevaluation of “National Winter Garden.” Crane liked limericks for the same reason he liked burlesque: not in spite of their vulgarity, but because of it. Limericks, of course, are also one of the most popular forms of light verse, and thus not a literary genre with which Crane is customarily associated. As with his enthusiasm for burlesque, though, Crane’s limericks show that he treated the distinction between high and low culture as a porous boundary which he sometimes took pleasure in mocking. Both of these “indecent” pastimes point toward purification by placing us in ritual contact with its systemic counterpart, defilement. This is not to suggest that Crane viewed his improvised limericks as on a par with his other writing. Clearly, he did not; if he had, manuscripts of the limericks would probably have survived. On the other hand, several of his poetic texts incorporate other aspects of popular culture. In addition to appropriating elements of burlesque in “National Winter Garden,” Crane inserts advertising slogans and popular song titles into “The River”; he depicts a jazz club scene in “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”; and he uses Irving Caesar’s song “What Do You Do Sunday, Mary?” as a model for “Virginia.”23 Even so, when Crane turns to popular culture, he often does

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so with the kind of elevating gesture that Lawrence Levine argues ends up reinforcing the “vertical hierarchy” of an Arnoldian concept of culture (224). Crane remains divided. On one hand, he sides with Whitman against classbound definitions of culture; on the other, the prevailing tenor of his “difficult” style is in accord with Arnold’s sacred sense of culture. Crane expresses admiration for the “indecency” of the body in another context that further supports this positive reading of “National Winter Garden.” In 1922, Crane was exhilarated by a dance performance Isadora Duncan presented in Cleveland. Indignant at the “rude and careless reception” she received, Crane describes her interaction with the audience as a melodramatic confrontation between the American artist and its prudish public: When it was all over she came to the fore-stage again in the little red dress that had so shocked Boston, as she stated, and among other things told the people to go home and take from the bookshelf the works of Walt Whitman, and turn to the section called “Calamus.” Ninety-nine percent of them had never heard of Whitman, of course, but that was part of the beauty of the gesture. Glorious to see her there with her right breast and nipple quite exposed, telling the audience that the truth was not pretty, that it was really indecent, and telling them (boobs!) about Beethoven, Tschaikowsky, and Scriabin. (114–5)

As I have shown in my introduction, Duncan conceived of her dancing as a form of high culture completely distinct from the lowbrow entertainment embodied by burlesque. And yet, Crane responds above all to her message that “the truth” of the body “was not pretty, that it was really indecent.” In one of the most striking instances outside of his poetry, Crane celebrates the body’s unruly indecency, finding in Duncan’s reversing of the categories of “beauty” and “ugliness” a prefiguration of his own reversals in “National Winter Garden.” Duncan’s celebration of the body’s “ugliness” also appeals to Crane because she allies herself with Whitman’s poetry of sexuality. Singling out “Calamus” in particular links this transvaluation of the ugly into the beautiful with the overturning of conventional categories of normal and abnormal sexuality. Crane’s identification with Whitman was of course not solely based on their shared homosexuality, but it is by now well-established just how large a role it played.24 It is also clear that by the 1920s the “Calamus” poems had become a touchstone in gay culture.25

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In a 1925 letter to Wilbur Underwood, Crane himself links the “Calamus” poems with homosexuality. Enclosed with the letter is an editorial from The Nation expressing dismay over opposition to a Whitman exhibit at the New York Public Library. Deriding attacks on Whitman for “having debauched a literary generation,” the editorial draws particular attention to outrage directed at “Calamus”: “When the world becomes aware that the author of ‘Calamus’ was abnormal, Mr. Heartman implies, it will cease to read him.” To Crane, it is “incredible” to learn how Whitman “is regarded in some quarters” (“Wind-blown Flames” 361–62). Embracing the garish sexuality of burlesque was, for Crane, consistent with defending the supposed “indecency” of Whitman’s and his own homosexuality. THE BURLESQUE OF LUST Crane’s decision to situate the most direct depiction of sexuality in The Bridge in a burlesque theater is consistent with his exaltation of the body’s “indecency.” Yet while Crane and others found the rawness of burlesque during the 1920s a mark of its authenticity, they were in fact witnessing changes in the genre that would secure its demise. The campaign against burlesque in New York, led by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, concluded in 1937 when the courts upheld the city’s refusal to license theaters that used the term “burlesque” in any way. The Minsky name was by this time so inextricable from burlesque that it, too, was barred from use in any theatrical enterprise.26 By this time the ban on Ulysses had been lifted, and greater toleration of uninhibited depictions of the body in literature seemed to be in the offing. Despite its surge of popularity during the Depression years, burlesque never earned a similar acceptance. In Robert Allen’s view, this is because the striptease had become the defining element of the shows: The true strip was burlesque’s last-ditch and ultimately unsuccessful strategy to stay alive. It represents not the symbol of burlesque’s golden age—although it is remembered as such—but rather its ultimate failure to sustain a performance medium sufficiently distinct in its appeals from other forms to draw an audience. The completely revealed female form was twentieth-century burlesque’s only trump card. When it was finally played, authorities in New York City moved to close down the game. (244)

Crane, of course, would not live to see this turn in burlesque’s fortunes. If Allen is correct, and the ascendancy of the striptease signals a degeneration

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into even less reputable forms of pornography, Crane’s appropriation of burlesque appears all the more striking for its audacity. A closer look at the ending of “National Winter Garden” in fact demonstrates that Crane turns to the striptease itself as a trope for purification. In the final quatrain, Crane appropriates another element of the burlesque stage, the trapeze, calling Magdalene’s body “the empty trapeze of your flesh” (89). In order to decipher this figure, it is necessary first of all to recover the place of the trapeze in burlesque history. Through the nineteenth century, elements of circus side shows were incorporated into burlesque productions, including such acrobatic acts as trapeze displays. During the 1870s, “lady minstrel shows” borrowed the idea of exhibiting women on trapezes from brothels, thus “furnishing a closer erotic view of fleshy thighs” (Zeidman 29). The trapeze is also linked to burlesque in some of the earliest films produced for commercial consumption in the 1890s. These film loops, which were viewed through the peep-show device known as the “Kinetoscope”—along with its flip-card competitor, the “Mutoscope”—could still be found in penny arcades in such places as Coney Island as late as the 1920s (Allen 267). In a 1901 Edison Kinetoscope examined by Allen, entitled “The Trapeze Disrobing Act,” a woman in Victorian street dress gradually removes her clothes while swinging on the trapeze. At several points her body is completely inverted as the trapeze swings before the viewer, presenting a tableau of her posterior with her legs extended straight up into the air. Part of the voyeuristic appeal of this act seems to lie in this vertiginous positioning of the female body. The strip ends with the woman clothed in camisole and drawers. The trapeze also turns up in Minsky’s memoir when he recounts a 1935 incident that prompted authorities to close the Little Apollo theater on 125th Street, which was operated by his brother Abe: Abe, who ran a much hotter show uptown than we ever dared on Broadway, managed to get closed down again for an act that I thought, frankly, was highly imaginative and I wished I’d thought of it first. It consisted of a stripper on a trapeze taking her clothes off gradually and dropping each item to the stage. It’s a shame the act only lasted about two nights before the theater was closed down. (256)

This episode indicates that authorities considered this form of the strip especially shocking, even at a venue where they tended to show greater tolerance for nudity. In addition to the vertiginous effects mentioned above, I suspect that the act was perceived as particularly lewd because the trapeze itself was

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treated by the stripper as a surrogate sexual partner. The trapeze thus becomes a mechanical body with which the stripper appears to be in sexual contact. By ending his poem with the trapeze, Crane is thus invoking an element of burlesque that pushed its eroticism to an extreme. On one level, calling Magdalene’s body an “empty trapeze” of flesh suggests that sexuality is disappointing because it remains an “empty” physical experience devoid of meaning. But if we view this phrase as an eccentric periphrasis for the human skeleton, it becomes apparent that Crane is extending the striptease into a conceit for stripping the very flesh from the bones. Crane evokes the skeleton without ever naming it through a cluster of allusions: the “fleshless door” with which the penultimate stanza ends, suggesting the fleshless body; the Elizabethan pun on orgasm and death evident in the words “to die alone”; the “infant bone[s]” that mark the very end of the poem; and, finally, the trapeze itself, a structural frame that supports an acrobat’s body, just as the skeleton is a frame that supports the body’s flesh. Stripping the body of its clothes reveals, for Crane, the indecent truths of the naked body. Ending the poem by going one step further and stripping the flesh from the body, Crane casts this erotic spectacle as a purification ritual that brings us into contact with death. Crane’s vision of eroticism thus resembles Georges Bataille’s description of how “eroticism opens the way to death” by conferring the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity—that path is the secret of eroticism and eroticism alone can reveal it. (24)

Although the poem closes on this note of mortality, the audience is also moving “lifeward,” its body reassembled “bone by infant bone.” In addition to serving as tokens of defilement because of their identification with corporeal putrefaction, bones are also whitened tokens of the purity to which the body has been pared down. Signifying both death and that which survives death, bones are uncanny objects that tend to confound the categories of purity and impurity, a polluted substance that purifies by affirming “that which has been rejected” (M. Douglas 164). “National Winter Garden” enacts just this kind of affirmation of the impure. With this paradoxically affirmative meaning of the striptease in mind, it appears that Morton Minsky grasped something about the tone of “National Winter Garden” that has eluded most of Crane’s academic readers. Burlesque may be tawdry, but because it showcases the kind of Dionysian eroticism he found so irresistible, Crane represents burlesque as a form

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of popular culture that signals renewal, not decay. Although Crane exalts the eroticism animating these performances, it might be argued instead that he maintains a distinction in The Bridge between eroticism itself and the lewd, grotesque form in which it is expressed on Minsky’s stage. After all, there is no question that Crane was also attracted to the kind of corporeal display featured in Isadora Duncan’s dances, which he considered accomplished works of high art. If Crane identifies with Duncan—and clearly he does—must he not also deplore the fact that displays of sexuality were more popular during the 1920s when they took the “degraded” form of burlesque shows rather than the refined form of an Isadora Duncan performance? Yet such a view is out of step with the abundant evidence that Crane was attracted to many forms of the “low”; it also overlooks the links between gay sexuality and the burlesque milieu, which, as we have seen, played an important part in Crane’s susceptibility to burlesque’s allure. Crane embraced burlesque not only because of its Dionysian vitality, but because it was stigmatized as a debased form of eroticism and thus occupied a position on the cultural margins that was analogous to his own status as a homosexual man. If Minsky is right, and Crane is celebrating burlesque, most of the interpretative schemes that try to account for the overall trajectory of The Bridge are in need of revision. The Bridge has often been seen in terms of a narrative arc that rises to a visionary climax in “The Dance,” descends through various manifestations of cultural degradation—including the supposedly debased eroticism of burlesque—and then rises again in “Atlantis” for Crane’s final, ecstatic affirmation of “One Song, One Bridge of Fire!” (108). But if “National Winter Garden” is not America’s slough of despond, “The Dance” may offer its modernist myth of primitive origins with more self-consciousness than most readings credit, and the “whispers antiphonal” with which “Atlantis” ends may still require our attentive ear. This is not to deny the impact of the Spenglerian thesis of cultural degeneration upon Crane’s poem, which is especially pronounced in “Quaker Hill,” the section in which Crane turns to none other than Isadora Duncan to exemplify the artist at odds with an uncomprehending American public. With a mixture of anger and despair, the speaker of “Quaker Hill” expresses the kind of longing for a lost cultural order that is more commonly associated with Eliot: Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace? What eats the pattern with ubiquity? Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race? (93)

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Yet if the scheme that ties together the disparate sections of The Bridge must take the idea of cultural decline into account, it must also acknowledge the subtleties and contradictions that inform Crane’s attitude toward cultural hierarchies. At the very least, it is clearly inadequate to view “National Winter Garden” as the representation of a cultural low point that needs to be overcome. Burlesque was part of the “hyper-sensual” world of Havana in which Crane met “suave” Cuban sailors; it challenged the middle-class standards of propriety that he himself felt stifled by; it was, as he told William Sommer, “the best entertainment” in New York.

Chapter Three

The Invented Indian of The Bridge: Hart Crane and the Ethnographic Idea of Culture

About Indian identity I have a revolutionary fervor. The hardest part of it is I believe we’re all invented as Indians. . . .The inventions have become disguises. —Gerald Vizenor (qtd. in Owens 4)

THE FOLKLORE OF TAXI DRIVERS When Hart Crane chose “Maquokeeta” as the name of the Native American “Sachem” who dies at the stake in “The Dance” section of The Bridge, he knew next to nothing about either its provenance or meaning. He was unaware of the Maquoketa River, which runs through several counties in northeastern Iowa before joining the Mississippi thirty miles south of Dubuque. Nor did he know that “maquoketa” is probably a corruption of “makwoketeg,” which signifies “there are bears” in the Algonquian language of the Sauk and Fox Indians (Vogel 40–1). All he really knew was that a New York City taxi driver who was—in Crane’s eyes—“obviously of Indian extraction (and a splendid fire-drinker by the way),” and who was from “Missouri, or thereabouts,” claimed “Maquokeeta” as his “Indian name” (310).1 About his ignorance Crane was both nonchalant and insecure. As I detail below, he displayed considerable anxiety as to whether or not the name was genuine, seeking out advice from others supposedly more knowledgeable about the ethnographic documentation of American Indian cultures that proliferated during the 1910s and 1920s. When his sources proved unable to authenticate the name, Crane brushed the whole matter off, declaring Maquokeeta “all the better for not being particularly definite” (HCW 74). Even more striking is the disparity between the boasts Crane makes in his correspondence about the “reality” of his Indian material and the generic 101

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Indian actually represented in the text of The Bridge, which clearly bears little relation to any specific indigenous culture. This contradictory attitude toward the appropriation of Native American subject-matter suggests that Crane’s version of that modernist phantasm known as “The Primitive” is a complex mixture of an idealizing universalism and a skeptical relativism. Rather than dismissing Crane’s primitivism as “atavistic” or “nostalgic”—as such critics as Ronald Bush continue to do2—it needs to be seen in the context of the ethnographic discourse of the post-World War I years, a crucial period in the history of anthropology that George W. Stocking, Jr. terms both “the defining moment of the fieldworker archetype” and “the beginning of the ‘classical’ period of modern anthropology” (“Ethnographic Sensibility” 210). In his correspondence, Crane’s literary ambition to represent Indians with authenticity resembles the aims of ethnographic writing. The poetic text itself, however, suggests that the Indian observed in “The Dance” is a fabrication designed to expose the “primitive” as a hypothetical category constructed by the Western imagination. What has not been stressed enough in most readings of this section of The Bridge is the degree to which the poem’s speaker is aware that it is his own desire to recover “mythic consciousness” that generates the tropes and imagery by which we recognize modernist primitivism.3 This tension between Crane’s poetic fictions and his attraction to the rhetoric of anthropology as, in Radcliffe-Brown’s words, a science of “concrete, observable facts” (qtd. in Herbert 2) points toward the fundamental contradiction at the heart of “The Dance.” On the one hand, the poem views the primitive as a projective fantasy, a product of subjectivity itself. This aspect of the poem is most salient when Crane’s speaker urges a Native American shaman, who serves as an avatar of the poet, to “lie to us” in the process of conjuring the primitive origins of culture: Medicine-man, relent, restore— Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn! (64)

By placing himself in the roles of both magician and mystified observer, “liar” and “lied to,” Crane calls attention to the way a poetic fiction like the “tribal morn” is, as Eric Sundquist puts it, “created by the occasion of its own masquerade” (386). At odds with this skeptical perspective, however, is Crane’s uncritical replication of the well-worn ideological construct in which the “disappearance” of Native Americans is deemed the tragic but inevitable destiny that paves the way for the national cultural identity of the United States.

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The main action of “The Dance” consists of an arduous journey into the wilderness in which the “I” of the poem leaves civilization behind (“I left the village for dogwood”), overcomes a series of topographic obstacles (“Over how many bluffs, tarns, streams I sped!”), and discovers, “within some boding shade,” the long-sought realm of the Indians (62–3). There he witnesses the ritualistic killing of Maquokeeta, who is shot by arrows, burned at the stake, and struck by lightning, although the exact manner of death is rendered ambiguous by the interlocking set of metaphors that crowd the speaker’s voice as it rises to a sublime rhetoric of frenzy—a rhetoric that blurs the distinction between victim and observer, who die together as one fused consciousness. This long middle phase of “The Dance,” which recalls the quest narratives of romantic poetry (Shelley’s “Alastor” is the most obvious model), occupies sixteen of the poem’s twenty six quatrains and is framed by introductory and concluding segments. The quest itself is preceded by a four-stanza prologue which, in the guise of re-telling a creation myth, establishes the aura of fascination and bewilderment that suffuses the relationship between the observing consciousness and its Native American object of desire. These preludial stanzas end by introducing the legendary figure of Pocahontas as a veiled and virgin bride, a muse who lures the quester into Indian territory. Following the death-rite, “The Dance” closes with six stanzas that reflect upon the meaning of Maquokeeta’s sacrifice, viewing it as an allegorical expression of the demise of Native culture. With this coda, attention reverts to Pocahontas, now cast as an earth goddess who survives the vanquishing of Native Americans (“thine angered slain”), persisting as an ideal of freedom incarnated by the American landscape, “the torrent and the singing tree” (65). Even this schematic recapitulation suggests points of resemblance between “The Dance” and ethnography, both as the textual product and the experiential rite of passage envisaged by most anthropologists before World War II. There is, first of all, a fairly self-evident parallel between the overall narrative structure of Crane’s poem and the typical ethnographic scenario, since both involve the experience of a “civilized” outsider traveling to some remote region in order to witness the ritual activity of an indigenous people. Dancing in particular was one of the most frequently described rituals of ethnographic writing, having been a long-standing Western icon of primitive culture often employed to illustrate the alleged amorality and unfettered sexuality of foreign peoples.4 Indeed, Durkheim went so far as to identify primitive dance rites, in which “men leaped and pranced about,” as the “effervescent social environments” out of which emerged the “religious idea” (qtd. in C. Steiner 224).

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There is also a convergence between the new methodology of “participant observation” that came to prominence in the 1920s and Crane’s manipulation of point of view in “The Dance.” As James Clifford explains, participant observation serves as a shorthand for a continuous tacking between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of events: on the one hand grasping the sense of specific occurrences and gestures empathetically, on the other stepping back to situate these meanings in wider contexts. Particular events thus acquire deeper or more general significance, structural rules, and so forth. Understood literally, participant observation is a paradoxical, misleading formula, but it may be taken seriously if reformulated in hermeneutic terms as a dialectic of experience and interpretation. (Predicament 34)

Subjectivity in “The Dance” is engaged in just such a “tacking” between participatory and observational perspectives. Although the poem is cast in the voice of a first-person speaker, Crane alternates between emphasizing and suppressing first-person pronouns, generating the “dialectic of experience and interpretation” that Clifford associates with participant observation. Moreover, just as ethnographic fieldwork based on this method is “marked by an increased emphasis on the power of observation” (Predicament 31), Crane’s quester repeatedly watches and listens with acute attentiveness for indications of an Indian presence. The quester declares, for instance, that “I could see” (62) Pocahontas’s hair, and that, “watching, [I] saw” its image “die” (62). As if to counter his own disbelief at detecting Indian drum-beats emanating from a storm cloud, the quester insists, “I heard it” (63). “I saw more escorts” (64), and “I heard the hush of lava” (64), he announces; and, as Maquokeeta dies, Crane emphasizes once again the quester’s observational vantage: “I saw thy change begun!” (64). I do not mean to suggest that Crane engages in the documentation of cultural “facts.” Indeed, he freely admits that he based the totemic imagery of serpents and eagles in “The Dance” on “intuitions,” and was thus pleasantly surprised to learn that they were “valid Indian symbols of time and space” that had been used “in the ritual of the Aztecs” (310). Here Crane unwittingly demonstrates his lack of knowledge about the native populations of America, failing to distinguish between the Aztecs and the hundreds of other Indian cultures, in some of which eagles and snakes are in fact quite important cultural symbols. But Crane didn’t know this. What Crane calls “intuitions” are most probably his internalization of the eagle and serpent symbolism present in works by Shelley, Nietzsche, and

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other nineteenth-century writers, although this symbolism is itself linked to European fantasies of primitive and archaic cultures and the ethnographic writings that fed those fantasies.5 Crane believed he was relying on “intuitions,” not ethnography. Nevertheless, he makes numerous gestures toward ethnographic description, both by referring to such items as tepees, spears, drums, arrows, and “stag teeth,” and by featuring various details of corporeal adornment that mark Maquokeeta as a “tribal” figure, such as his “anklets” and his eagle-feather headdress. Crane’s contradictory posture toward ethnographic verisimilitude is most clearly on display in his correspondence with Yvor Winters, the poetcritic with whom Crane discussed various aspects of his poetics between 1926 and 1930, and to whom he turns in 1927 for help in researching the meaning of “Maquokeeta.” Although he terms his request “a minor matter” (310), Crane raises the subject three times over the course of several months, confessing at the outset that he would have rather held back “The Dance” so that Winters could read it in the context of the entire “Powhatan’s Daughter” sequence. Presiding over this five-part section of The Bridge is the far more familiar name of Pocahontas, the legendary “Princess” who had long since passed into American folklore as the “Good Indian” who renounces loyalty to her race in order to rescue Captain John Smith from certain execution. In his appropriation of the Pocahontas story, Crane ignores its central element—the rescue—and instead plays up her qualities as the archetypal American bride, elevating her into an earth goddess. As he explains in a letter to Otto Kahn, she serves in The Bridge as the “mythological nature-symbol chosen to represent the physical body of the continent” (345). Crane never expresses any misgivings about this re-writing of the legend for his own ends, perhaps in part because Vachel Lindsay had in 1917 already promoted Pocahontas to spiritual progenitrix of America in the “magical genealogy” (Young 407) of his poem “Our Mother Pocahontas.” The obscure Maquokeeta, however, was another matter. Although he wanted Winters to read “The Dance” along with the rest of “Powhatan’s Daughter,” Crane found himself “a little too impatient to ask [Winters] a question to delay longer”: I’m anxious to know if there is an Indian philology or symbolism concerned in the name “Maquokeeta.” I chose the name at random, merely from the hearsay of a NY taxi driver. . .You know much more about Indian fable, symbolism etc. than I do. Will you let me know if the name is ‘sufficient’ to the role it plays in the poem? (310)

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As I detail below, Crane had ample grounds for viewing Winters as something of an authority on American Indians. At one point, in a somewhat anxious postscript, Crane even invites Winters to propose his own, presumably more-informed candidate for an Indian name: “If any better name occurs to you please suggest it to me. From a purely ‘physical’ standpoint—(sound, quantity, cadence) I’m perfectly satisfied—but it may possess some jarring connotations for all I know” (311). Winters was not the only one whose help Crane enlisted. “I’ve felt quite guilty,” he explains, for having put you (and others) to such lengthy pains anent the investigation of Maquokeeta. I feel perfectly reassured, however, for obviously the name isn’t some notorious joke. Even if it has no existence as a name it’s quite practical for my purposes, as it certainly sounds Indian enough to apply to a redskin. (323)

It is difficult to read this letter without being disturbed by the unconscious racism behind Crane’s reference to Maquokeeta as a “redskin.” Yet these remarks also show that Crane went to considerable lengths to investigate the name of his imaginary Indian, partly, to be sure, to avoid committing an embarrassing gaffe. As he rather jocosely puts it to Winters, he wanted to make sure that the name “didn’t mean Rosenphallus or Hot Tomaly” (HCW 74). Yet there is more involved in Crane’s concern than the fear of ridicule, more than the desire to inoculate his poem against “some notorious joke.” He was intent, as he explained to Kahn, upon “possessing the Indian and his world as a cultural factor” (347), and he believed that he had managed to pull off the task. As he gushed to Kenneth Burke in the midst of composing “Powhatan’s Daughter” in August, 1926, “It’s got real Indians in it!” (273). Winters was in fact more knowledgeable than Crane about ethnography and the translation of Native American oral materials into English. While attending the University of Chicago in 1917, Winters had come to know Harriet Monroe precisely at the time she was beginning to open the pages of Poetry to translations of Native American oral texts, including a special “Indian Issue” in February 1917. Shortly thereafter, while in residence at a Sante Fe sanatorium between 1918 and 1921, Winters deepened his association with the vogue for Indianness through his contacts with Monroe’s co-editor, Alice Corbin Henderson, a poet and translator of Indian poetry and, like Monroe, something of an activist on behalf of Native Americans. Henderson was a key figure in the turn to the Indian. “The American Indian stands revealed as a poet of no mean order,” she declared in 1918. “His theatrical art . . . is the finest thing we have in this country without exception,

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the most consummate, primal art.”6 Henderson contributed several essays on Indian literature to Poetry—including one in the Indian issue—and a selection of her translations appear in The Path on the Rainbow (1918), an anthology of songs, prayers, creation myths, and other traditional genres that is still considered one of the first important collections of Native American poetry in English. The Path on the Rainbow generated a good deal of attention, garnering reviews by T. S. Eliot in The Athenaeum (1919)—better known as his widely quoted “War-Paint and Feathers”—Louis Untermeyer in The Dial (1919), Carl Van Doren in The Nation (1923), and John Gould Fletcher in The Freeman (1923). Indeed, Untermeyer’s piece precipitated a debate in the pages of The Dial that lasted for six months.7 Winters himself joined the fray with an enthusiastic 1928 review for transition, which I compare further on in this chapter with Eliot’s dismissive appraisal. During his years in Santa Fe, Winters also composed two early books of Imagist verse, The Immobile Wind (1921) and The Magpie’s Shadow (1922), which Crane read in December 1926, shortly before broaching the question of Maquokeeta’s name. As Winters himself writes, “the Indians especially were an influence on The Magpie’s Shadow” (10), a slim volume consisting almost entirely of one- and two-line hexasyllabic poems that resemble some of the texts in The Path on the Rainbow, especially the Chippewa songs transcribed and translated by the ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore. Despite this familiarity with things Indian, Winters was in the end unable to supply any definite information about “Maquokeeta,” apparently failing to identify its source in the Sauk-Fox language and thus incapable of confirming its authenticity. Once it becomes clear that Winters could not provide ethnographic confirmation of the name’s legitimacy, Crane’s anxiety turns jocular: I think that the Indian chieftain’s name is all the better for not being particularly definite—especially as Pocahontas had a thousand Indian lovers for the one white marriage license to the English planter. I shall continue to depend on taxi drivers for all matters of folklore. (HCW 74)

Mocking John Rolfe, the “English planter” who married Pocahontas, Crane echoes Lindsay’s poem, which declares: Rolfe, that dim adventurer, Had not come a courtier. John Rolfe is not our ancestor—

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The Machine that Sings We rise from out the soul of her Held in native wonderland, While the sun’s rays kissed her hand, In the springtime, In Virginia, Our mother, Pocahontas.8

In addition to this denigration of the nation’s European lineage, Crane’s remark reflects a complex attitude toward “folklore” that has ramifications for his notion of the primitive; it also points toward Crane’s susceptibility to the myth of primitive promiscuity, which surfaces in the highly eroticized ritualism of “The Dance.”9 The curious thing about Crane’s remark is that it both derides and validates the empirical premises of the ethnographic enterprise. On the one hand he rejects the need for expert philological knowledge to authenticate Maquokeeta’s name, favoring in its place the testimony of a taxi driver. On the other hand, he claims authenticity for the name based on his own firsthand gathering of “folklore,” thus placing himself in the role of ethnographer as conceived in the newly ascendant methodology of participant observation. His “informant,” the taxi driver “of Indian extraction,” is a source of cultural description at least as legitimate—if not more so—as Winters or some other authority on Indian philology. Armchair speculation is trumped by fieldwork, consistent with the methodological shift that occurred in anthropology around the turn of the century from comparative evolutionism to an empirically-grounded cultural relativism.10 Crane’s implicit assumption of the ethnographer’s role may seem, at first glance, to be of only peripheral relevance to the actual text of “The Dance.” After all, although the taxi driver from whom Crane learned the name “Maquokeeta” contributes to the poem’s pre-history, he is completely occluded from the text itself. Crane’s attraction to ethnography did not, however, come to an end with the 1930 publication of The Bridge. Living in Mexico in 1931 and 1932, Crane planned a never-realized poetic drama on Montezuma, Cortez, and the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, “a blank verse tragedy of Aztec mythology” for which he looked forward to “study[ing] the obscure calendars of dead kings” (275), an activity that sounds remarkably akin to the kind of research that went into the famous book he pored over during the fall of 1923: James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough.11 In addition to writing a handful of short poems dealing with the indigenous cultures of Mexico, such as “The Sad Indian” and “The Circumstance” (dedicated to Xochipilli, the Aztec god of flowers), Crane’s letters from Mexico often touch

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on what he calls “the nature of the Mexican Indian” (493). Writing to Eda Lou Walton, for instance, he speaks of “penetrating to a new kind of world in the psychology of the Indians” (389). Most striking of all are his visits to the village of Tepoztlán, where, in the company of an archaeologist, he witnesses and participates in a seasonal ritual that he recounts in detail in his correspondence. In 1926, Tepoztlán was itself the locus of the ethnographic fieldwork upon which Robert Redfield based his contested notion of “folk culture,” which he formulates in Tepoztlán: A Mexican Village (1930), a work praised by Alfred Kroeber as a “landmark” monograph in the Boasian tradition (qtd. in Stocking, “Ethnographic Sensibility” 235). I turn to Crane’s account of the Tepoztlán ritual later in this chapter as additional evidence that his representations of Indians overlap with the ethnographic discourse of the 1920s. In translating this fieldwork-like experience into an epistolary text, Crane echoes certain elements of “The Dance,” suggesting that in Tepoztlán he believed he was witnessing the kind of primitive ritual that he had earlier only imagined in his poem. My purpose here is not to apologize for Crane’s stereotypical depiction of Native Americans, the most pernicious aspect of which is probably his rehearsal of the widespread myth of cultural extinction that relegates Indians to a “dead” or “vanishing” past. Crane articulates this view repeatedly, perhaps most vividly in “The River” section of The Bridge. Listening to the mingled sounds of a transcontinental locomotive and the American landscape, Crane’s speaker discerns the “dead echoes” of Native American culture: Trains sounding the long blizzards out—I heard Wail into distances I knew were hers. Papooses crying on the wind’s long mane Screamed redskin dynasties that fled the brain, —Dead echoes! But I knew her body there, Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark, And space, an eaglet’s wing, laid on her hair. (59)

It is the “echoes” of these “redskin dynasties” that Crane imagines reviving in the “The Dance,” but they are recuperated only in order to die before the eyes of his watchful speaker. This pattern is conspicuously borne out, for instance, by the coincidence of Maquokeeta’s advent with his impending death: Know, Maquokeeta, greeting; know death’s best; —Fall, Sachem, strictly as the tamarack! (63)

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At the very moment Maquokeeta’s name first appears in the poem, the speaker salutes him and utters his death sentence in a single gesture. Moreover, Maquokeeta’s death is not a random event; like the noble tree to which he is compared, he is to die “strictly”—that is, by design, according to the destiny mapped out for him by the violent course of American history. As the sacrifice of Maquokeeta comes to its close, the speaker thus observes him “dive to kiss that destiny / Like one white meteor” (64). This rhetoric of “destiny” is very much along the lines laid down by Crane’s friend Waldo Frank in Our America, who extols the “spiritual greatness” (107) of Native Americans but pronounces the following valediction: The Indian is dying and is doomed. There can be no question of this. There need be no sentimentality. It may seem unjust that a spiritual culture so fine as his should be blotted out before the iron march of the Caucasian. It may seem the very irony of progress. But Justice is an anthropomorphic fantasy. . . .The white man came with his material prowess, and under the steel hail of his onslaught the world of the Indian, its profound residence in Nature, lies maimed and buried. . . .[The Indian] no longer dreams of physical resistance. . . .The Indian will be destroyed. (115–16)

In proposing that one can, paradoxically, hear an echo that has already died, Crane’s elegiac “wail” for Native Americans replicates what Clifford has termed an “allegory of salvage,” the pervasive “rhetorical construct” of ethnographic writing in which “the other is lost, in disintegrating time and space, but saved in the text” (“Ethnographic” 112). In this paradigm, which is consistent with long-standing Western notions of pastoral, the object of ethnographic research—the “savage,” the “primitive,” nonliterate “traditional” society—is construed as an “endangered authenticity” perpetually on the verge of extinction.12 “For us, primitive societies are ephemeral,” the German ethnologist Adolph Bastian declared in 1881. “At the very instant they become known to us they are doomed” (qtd. in Clifford, “Ethnographic” 112). In the letter to Kahn from which I have already quoted, Crane describes “The Dance” in terms that reiterate both the myth of Indian extinction and the ethnographic allegory of salvage with which it is linked: Here one is on the pure mythical and smoky soil at last! Not only do I describe the conflict between the two races in this dance—I also

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become identified with the Indian and his world before it is over, which is the only method possible of ever really possessing the Indian and his world as a cultural factor. I think I really succeed in getting under the skin of this glorious and dying animal, and in terms of expression, in symbols, which he himself would comprehend. Pocahontas (the continent) is the common basis of our meeting, she survives the extinction of the Indian, who finally, after being assumed into the elements of nature (as he understood them) persists only as a kind of ‘eye’ in the sky, or as a star that hangs between day and night—‘the twilight’s dim perpetual throne.’ (347)

To see Native Americans as “glorious and dying animal[s]” is, of course, in accord with the allegory of salvage; it is also a rather brutal exemplification of the modernist proclivity for locating animality in the mirror of the primitive other—often, as here, with racist implications. This view of Native Americans has much in common with what Clifford identifies as one of the problematic dimensions of salvage ethnography, which is based upon a “scientific and moral authority” that “assume[s] the other society is weak and ‘needs’ to be represented by an outsider (and that what matters in its life is its past, not present or future)” (“Ethnographic” 113). It is nevertheless important to keep in mind that for Crane—as for many of his modernist contemporaries during the 1920s—animality registers as a positive dimension of human nature in need of reclamation from the repressive constraints of Victorian social mores, from, in short, too much “civilization.” This animus against “civilization,” as opposed to what Edward Sapir in 1919 terms “genuine culture,” is typical of the era. Although Crane ultimately rejected the pessimistic outlook of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, he was deeply affected when he read it in 1926, calling it “one of the most magnificent and formidable books” he had ever read (277). Crane’s Spenglerian view of modern society as decadent surfaces, for instance, in a 1927 letter that idealizes the body’s animality, which he locates in the “savagery” of primitive culture: It’s no use to tell you how futile I feel most of the time—no matter what I do or conceive doing, even. Part of the disease of the modern consciousness, I suppose. There is no standard of values in the modern world—it’s mostly slop, priggishness and sentimentality. One had much better be a wild man in Borneo and at least have a clear and unabashed love for the sight of blood. (344)

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For Crane, in a dispirited mood, civilization is eviscerated and degenerate— “priggish,” “sentimental,” “diseased.” The ways of the “wild man,” by contrast, supply the tonic, the “unabashed” physicality that would restore him and his society to health. In “The Dance,” Crane dwells repeatedly on the physicality of Indians, figuring their bodies in animal terms consistent with the “glorious and dying animal” he describes to Kahn. Indeed, it is precisely this focus on bodies that constitutes another of the principal links between The Bridge and the ethnographic concept of culture, which, according to Christopher Herbert, coalesced in large part around efforts to disprove the myth of the promiscuous primitive during the late nineteenth century. I turn to this question further on in connection with the motif of speed that plays such a prominent role in “The Dance.”13 Outside of “National Winter Garden” and its bracing depiction of a burlesque show, replete with “outspoken buttocks” and the “swivellings” of a stripper’s “teats,” “The Dance” dwells on the human body more extensively than any other section of The Bridge. As Langdon Hammer has proposed, The Bridge may be viewed as a search for the “idealized whole of a redeemed body,” toward which the poem advances with “a violence of logic and style that coincides, on the level of the narrative, with the recurrent sacrifice and disappearance of the quester’s body” (177). In “The Dance” this sacrifice is figured by the ritual death of Maquokeeta, but Crane’s concern with the body extends beyond this single violent event. It is evident from the very first words of the section, drawing our attention to “swift red flesh” (62). It is also apparent in the “glacier woman” who “spouted arms”; the “mythical brows” and “burnished hands” of Native Americans; Pocahontas’s “breasts,” “brown lap,” “bridal flanks,” and “tawny pride”; the repeated references to her hair; the eagle feathers, dubbed a “turbine crest,” that grace Maquokeeta’s “back”; the “tendons” that “scurr[y]”; the teeth, “red fangs,” and “splay tongues” that come alive as Maquokeeta dies; the “heart’s hot root” purged by the sound of an Indian’s “padded foot”; the “wrestling” of “arms,” the “stag teeth,” and the “raven throat” on display during the sacrifice; the lizard that “drops his legs”; the “lean” body of Maquokeeta, “thewed” by lightning; the birch tree’s “fingers”; the “snake” that “casts his pelt,” “sprout[s]” a “horn,” and “Spark[s]” a “tooth”; the enigmatic “pulsant bone”; and, finally, a hillside’s anthropomorphic “groins.” In addition to this lengthy though incomplete catalogue, the poem evokes the animality of the body with its numerous references to animals and animal body parts, including serpents, snakes, eagles, “neighing” horses, moth wings, trout, buzzards, caribou, and antlers. Crane also signals his concern with the animality of the body—and its status within anthropological discourse—in the coda to the poem when the

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speaker solemnly intones, “Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid” (65), thereby explicitly yoking the sacrificial immolation of Maquokeeta with the notion of totemism. It is now well-established that totemism is a Western construct based on a number of misapprehensions about systems of clanmembership and beliefs in guardian spirits.14 Yet the theory of totemism was the object of much speculation between the 1870s and World War I, at which time it became largely discredited among anthropologists because data from the field was at odds with its central hypothesis: that the custom of consuming the totem animal (or plant), normally “taboo” and thus not to be eaten, is linked to an exogamous kinship structure. Elaborating on John F. McLennan’s theory of primitive marriage, Robertson Smith argued in 1879 that the Christian sacrament of the eucharist was a “survival” of totemic ritual, thus setting into motion the pursuit of a grand foundation myth for Western civilization. Totemism continued to exert considerable influence among writers and artists even after being rejected by most anthropologists. This afterlife was due in large part to its dissemination by Freud’s fable of cultural origins, Totem and Taboo, by the popularity of The Golden Bough, which dwells at length on totemic ritual, and by the centrality of totemism to Durkheim’s theory of religion. Here is Adam Kuper’s explanation for the persistent and continuing appeal of totemism: With totemism, anthropology achieved for the first and only time an agreed myth of the origin of human society, which accounted for the family and for religion, and represented both as contingent, irrational, but temporary constraints on the potentialities of civilized man. Totemism therefore served as a foundation myth of rationalism; yet at the same time it offered a symbolic idiom in which a poet could celebrate a more natural time, when man’s spirit was at one with plants and birds and beasts, and mythical, poetic thought was commonplace, and sexual instincts uninhibited. It was the anthropologists’ Garden of Eden. (121)

Eliot was one of those fascinated by Frazer’s and Durkheim’s accounts of totemic ritual, but not because it enabled him to “celebrate a more natural time.” As Marc Manganaro has argued, the totem serves as a conceptual model for Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” as a “material emblem” around which “collective sentiments” are expressed” (77). More importantly, Eliot believed that “no interpretation of a rite could explain its origin” (qtd. in Manganaro 75), and the totemic rite’s fundamental opacity seemed to confirm Eliot’s ritual theory of art, in which the rite is an irreducible

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ethnographic fact that precedes any act of interpretation.15 Crane, too, conceived of poetic language as a ritual act, but he was also attracted to the “symbolic idiom” of totemism, an idiom which, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, “assimilates men to animals” (2). Like the “glorious and dying animal” Crane speaks of in his letter to Kahn, the Indians depicted in “The Dance” are, as I have suggested, “assimilated” to animals. So the dying Maquokeeta is figured as an animal’s body in the midst of metamorphosis, first as a snake that “casts his pelt,” then as a lizard that “drops his legs.” On this point, at least, Crane’s stated intentions are in synch with the text of his poem. As others have pointed out, however, these self-promoting letters to Kahn are often inaccurate guides to what actually transpires in The Bridge and must therefore be invoked with caution. A financier and prominent patron of the arts, Kahn gave Crane several thousand dollars to support the writing of The Bridge, and Crane’s “progress reports” sometimes resemble grant proposals laboring to persuade the reader of his project’s worthiness. William Pritchard, for instance, views the letters to Kahn as a “hindrance to reading the poem” (253). Even so, these letters help document points of intersection between Crane’s poetics and the discourse of ethnography, which has by and large been neglected in the secondary literature on Crane. R. W. B. Lewis, for instance, asserts that “historical familiarity with the actual American Indian will only divert the reader’s understanding” (313). Viewing Crane’s Indian motifs as “a purely poetic and visionary structure,” Lewis holds that it “is beside the point” (313) to question the relation between Crane’s fabrication and Native American history. It is my goal, however, to show how Crane’s poetry reflects and contributes to the cultural construction of “The Indian.” Walter Benn Michaels and Jared Gardner have recently begun to redress this bias against historicizing Crane’s primitivism. Both Michaels and Gardner read The Bridge in the context of nativist appropriations of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity, making the provocative argument that Crane identifies the nation’s “Indian inheritance” with a “myth of homosexual origins” (Gardner 25).16 Michaels and Gardner do not, however, address the links between Crane’s poetics and ethnography. Although they cite the letter to Kahn quoted above so as to illustrate Crane’s nativist impulses, they overlook the way Crane echoes ethnographic discourse. Neither they nor any other critic has previously noticed, for instance, that Crane’s striking articulation of a national mythology of the soil (“Here one is on the pure mythical and smoky soil at last!”) is in fact nearly identical to a passage from Winters’s poem “The Streets”:

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the wilderness, inveterate and slow, a vastness one has never seen, stings to the tongue and ear. The terror in the taste and sound of the unseen has overwhelmed me; I am on the mythical and smoky soil at last— (Early Poems 96–7)

Crane read these lines shortly before explaining “The Dance” to Kahn, and he in fact quotes these very same words (“mythical and smoky soil”) back to Winters in the course of commenting on Winters’s poems.17 The presence of Winters’s words in this letter points to the fact that Crane’s rhetoric of cultural nationalism is mediated by Winters and the ethnographic discourse with which he was familiar. THE NATIVE POINT OF VIEW Crane sought to imbue “The Indian” he invented for The Bridge with authenticity, but in this ambition he found himself caught between two modes of representation: a poetic one based on the crafting of a subjective voice out of certain techniques of prosody and figuration, and an anthropological one based on Edward Tylor’s seminal definition of culture as a “complex whole,” a set of empirical facts that can be observed, documented, and analyzed as a system. But just as Crane’s depiction of Native Americans amalgamates poetic subjectivity and ethnographic empiricism, the modern anthropological concept of culture is itself beset with tensions between subjective and objective cognitive paradigms. As the comparative evolutionism of nineteenth-century ethnography gave way to functionalist models and a relativist notion of the multiplicity of cultures, anthropology’s objective shifted away from the discovery of “natural laws” by which to reconstruct the evolution of sociocultural phenomena, and toward the goal articulated by Bronislaw Malinowski in his watershed study Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922): “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world” (25). Like the ethnographic fieldworkers who redefined anthropology during the 1920s, Crane, too, was attracted by the prospect of comprehending “the native’s point of view.” Writing “The Dance” section of The Bridge was, as Crane puts it, a way of “identifying with the Indian and his world before it is over” by depicting Native Americans “in terms of expression, in symbols, which [they themselves] would comprehend” (347). And yet,

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unlike many other Euro-American writers interested in “The Indian” during this period, Crane never pretends to be a serious student of indigenous languages and cultures, and his method for “possessing the Indian . . . as a cultural factor” never involves simulating the traditional oral genres of American Indians. Although he desired the names he used to “sound Indian,” he did not seek, in his poetry, to “sound” like an Indian. One would never mistake the rhymed quatrains of iambic pentameter, the idiosyncratic diction, or the catachrestic figures of speech that mark “The Dance” as anything but the voice of a modernist poet. This sets him apart from such connoisseurs of Native culture as Mary Austin, Natalie Curtis Burlin, John G. Neihardt, and Lew Sarett, all of whom sought to inhabit the voice of American Indians, either through translation, ventriloquism, or quasi-ethnographic projects to salvage aspects of what was widely perceived as a “vanishing” culture. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from Mary Austin’s “reëxpression” of “Rain Songs from the Rio Grande Pueblos”: People of the middle heaven Moving happily behind white floating cloud masks, Moving busily behind rain-straitened cloud masks; People of the Lightning, People of the Thunder, People of the Rainbow, Rain! Rain! Rain! (110)

Austin herself disavowed any expertise in Native languages, working instead from the “literal” translations executed by such figures as Boas and Frances Densmore. Even so, as is evident in the lines above, Austin strove to replicate the parallelisms and repetitions that mark some (though not all) Native American oral traditions.18 Like many other aficionados of the Indian, she identified so thoroughly with Native Americans that at times she had difficulty distinguishing herself from them. Thus, although she shies away from offering herself as “an authority on things Amerindian,” she writes: “I do not wish to have it understood that I may not, at times, have succeeded in being an Indian” (41). Crane, of course, performs no translation whatsoever in the strict sense of that term; he appropriates Indian motifs and, as he puts it, “identifies” with the Indian, but he expresses this identification through the manipulation of subjectivity. In the course of Maquokeeta’s harrowing sacrifice, the speaker of the poem both observes the rite and places himself in Maquokeeta’s

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position, crying out: “I could not pick the arrows from my side” (64). Simply by deciding to ask Winters for help in researching Maquokeeta’s name, however, Crane signals his awareness of ethnographic efforts to document Native cultures. Inviting Winters to concur that Maquokeeta “sounds Indian enough” (323), Crane echoes the concern with cultural authenticity that one finds so frequently among ethnographers, translators, and literary acolytes of American Indians during this period. Whether they view themselves as scientific recorders of primitive culture, or aesthetic interpreters of primitive consciousness, all of these writers are guided by the overriding question of cultural authenticity: How Indian is it? Thus the notes to Poetry’s special 1917 “Indian issue” stress that most of the contributors “have derived their interpretations of tribal folk-poetry . . . from direct contact with the tribes themselves” (274). In his preface to Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian (1926), the anthropologist Paul Radin (a Boas disciple) describes his objective as “discovering what the real Indian is like.” Conceding “the difficulty in obtaining an inside view of [Indian] culture from their own lips and by their own initiative,” Radin asserts that autobiography circumvents the inevitable biases of ethnographic observation by having “a native himself give the account in his own mother tongue” (viii-ix). Black Elk Speaks (1932), probably the most well-known Native American autobiography, grows out of a similar quest by a non-Indian writer for Indian authenticity. In 1930, the poet John G. Neihardt traveled to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota to gather material for A Cycle of the West, the epic historical poem that he had been working on since 1912. There he was introduced to Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux “holy man” who participated in the Ghost Dances and survived the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. “What I needed for my purpose,” Neihardt explains, “was something to be experienced through intimate contact” (xv). Thinking that Black Elk’s life-story “would be a revelation of the Indian consciousness from the depths” (qtd. in Castro 84), Neihardt put aside his epic poem to work on Black Elk Speaks, for which, of course, he is much better well-known today than for his long Virgilian narrative poems on the history of the American West. Although texts such as Black Elk Speaks and Crashing Thunder purport to convey “the native’s point of view,” they are in fact what Arnold Krupat terms “bicultural composites” (For Those 90). In Krupat’s view, the encounter between Euro-American editor and Indian subject out of which these texts emerge is best thought of as “the textual equivalent of the frontier,” where “domination and appropriation” (33) govern the exchange. Crashing Thunder’s “autobiography,” for instance, misleadingly conflates several

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narratives that Radin collected from Winnebago Indians. And despite Vine Deloria, Jr.’s acclamation that Black Elk Speaks is “a North American bible for all tribes” that helps “clarify those beliefs that are ‘truly Indian’” (xiii), there is ample evidence that among other editorial distortions, Neihardt’s additions and revisions to the narrative tend to conceal Black Elk’s desire to revive traditional Lakota culture.19 These “composite” texts thus raise the same questions that have recently been posed from within anthropology itself about the dynamics of cross-cultural representation. As Clifford puts it, “the West can no longer present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others” in a post-colonial global arena defined by “the reversal of the European gaze” (Predicament 22). Like Clifford’s critique of what he terms “ethnographic authority,” much recent anthropological theory focuses on “the relation between cultural representation and the authority of those who represent” (Manganaro 3). In offering their texts as neutral and transparent representations of another culture, both Radin and Neihardt obscure the unequal balance of power they hold as readers of the cultural other. Black Elk Speaks and Crashing Thunder may seem, at first glance, to have little bearing on The Bridge. Yet as Crane’s correspondence shows, he viewed “The Dance” as—in Neihardt’s words—“a revelation of the Indian consciousness from the depths,” just as Neihardt and Radin conceived their work as efforts to represent Native American cultures in an authentic manner. The recent re-orientation of anthropological theory, in which ethnography is viewed as a discursive product that needs to be treated, like any text, as an “interpretive textual process” (Manganaro 2), has rendered Crane’s poem and Neihardt’s “collaboration” with Black Elk more similar than they once appeared. The Bridge and Black Elk Speaks are very different texts, both on the local level of rhetoric and trope, and on the generic level of modernist poem versus a first-hand prose narrative of historical witness and spiritual autobiography. And yet, by juxtaposing these nearly contemporary works, one discerns that their representations of Indian (ergo, American) authenticity are both fabrications, textual fictions in ambiguous dialogue with history. REAL INDIANS, GENUINE CULTURE Shortly before receiving Crane’s request for assistance regarding Maquokeeta, Yvor Winters displays a very similar concern with the authenticity of representations of Native American culture. In a 1926 essay, he draws a strong distinction between the “real Indian” and cheap imitations, complaining that a recent Sante Fe arts festival was marred by a “fake Indian musician,” a “fake

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archaeologist,” and “fake Indian performers” (32). He is especially contemptuous of Lew Sarett’s “Blue Duck,” a poem recited at the festival that Winters terms “obviously a fake” (33), and which, to his delight, was received by Indians in the audience with “derision” (33). Appropriating Native American subject-matter and emulating their aesthetic values is, however, perfectly legitimate for Winters: Not that I have any objection to the artist who is able to learn something from the Indians—we can learn from them certain very definite things in poetry, and painting, and probably more in music, though heaven knows I am no musician. One could even borrow a few of their symbols and motifs now and again, and get away with it, provided one had something of one’s own to which to apply it. But this notion of interpreting the Indian is too much for me. They are in no need of assistance whatsoever, as anyone is aware who has ever read the really great translations of Frances Densmore, Washington Matthews, Frank Russell, and Jeremiah Curtin—translations that can take their place with no embarrassment beside the best Greek or Chinese versions of H.D. or Ezra Pound and which some day will do so. But Sarett and his swarm of little prototypes are like Lamartine in Italy or Symons in a brothel. (33)

Such a defense of “learning from Indians” is hardly surprising from a poet who had modeled his own book, The Magpie’s Shadow, on Densmore’s translations. But this statement brings home how important it was for Winters and others during these years to distinguish authentic “translations” from inauthentic “interpretations” of the Indian point of view. For if the former suggests scholarly labor and ethnographic documentation, the latter smacks of romantic swooning over exotic subjects like prostitutes and Italian adventures. Since Winters wrote this essay shortly before reading “The Dance” in manuscript in January 1927, one may assume that he evaluated Crane’s poem and its borrowing of Indian motifs with this same wariness for “fake” appropriations. Evidently, Winters must have concluded that Crane had learned his Indian lesson well, since Crane, responding to Winters, writes: “Your opinion of the Indian dance makes me happy” (HCW 54). Even in his notoriously negative review of The Bridge, Winters singles out “The Dance” as one of the “two most powerful” (26) sections, the other being “Atlantis.” And yet, even though Winters never explicitly states that he finds Crane’s use of Indian materials problematic, it may indeed be at the root of his extremely contradictory views of Crane’s poetry. In “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?,” his curious 1947

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overview of Crane’s career, Winters praises “The Dance” quite extravagantly, declaring that it contains “among the most magnificent passages of Romantic poetry in our language” (598). He complains, however, that although Crane “identifies” with the dying Maquokeeta, he does so “with no understanding of his agony” (596). Winters reiterates his aversion to the bogus aestheticization of Indian culture in his 1928 review of The Path on the Rainbow for transition, the important avant-garde magazine based in Paris. It was in fact Crane who had recommended transition to Winters as a “good wedge to use” (HCW 74) after it began publishing Crane’s poems in 1927, including “O Carib Isle!,” a meditation on death in the distinctly primitive setting of a tropical island. Winters’s enthusiasm for the collection is in sharp contrast to the judgment Eliot passes in his “War-Paint and Feathers,” in which he “welcome[s] the publication of primitive poetry,” but complains that it should be “more carefully documented than the present book.” He finds it impossible to know, for instance, how far its “interpretations” diverge from translations. “The poet and the anthropologist,” he insists, “both want to be provided with these data, and they are the only persons whose desires should be consulted” (1036). Like Eliot, Winters is wary of “interpreters” engaged in the “ridiculous” and “self-conscious effort to imitate a metric which belongs to a group of languages and a feeling for music as remote as possible from our own” (43). Winters’s praise is thus tempered by his opinion that the book has been “saddled with a section of ‘interpretations’” (35)—including those by Austin and Henderson—far inferior and less authentic than the translations contributed by such ethnographers as Boas, James Mooney, and Daniel Brinton. Not surprisingly, Winters is particularly effusive about Densmore’s Chippewa songs—which are strikingly similar to his verse in The Magpie’s Shadow—calling them “among the most endlessly fascinating poems of my experience” (36). One of the revealing points of contrast between Winters’s and Eliot’s reviews is that Eliot singles out one of these same Chippewa songs as especially ludicrous: But suddenly, egged on by New York and Chicago intelligentsia, the romantic Chippaway bursts into the drawing-room, and among murmurs of approval declaims his Maple Sugar Song Maple sugar is the only thing that satisfies me.

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The approval becomes acclamation. The Chippaway has the last word in subtlety, simplicity, and poeticality. Furthermore, his Continent is backing him. For, says the editor, it becomes appropriate and important that this collection of American Indian verse should be brought to public notice at a time when the whole instinctive movement of the American people is for a deeper footing in their native soil. (1036)

Here Eliot mocks Mary Austin for associating Indian poetry with the ambition by such writers as Williams, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Sandburg to fashion an authentically “American” voice. In addition to being on guard against romantic primitivism, Eliot’s lack of sympathy for this cultural nationalism informs his critique of The Path on the Rainbow—a critique that is coupled, however, with an affirmation of the importance of “primitive art and poetry” for its potential to “revivify” modern culture (1036). One white poet’s “real Indian” is, evidently, another’s “drawing-room” fake. In the course of his review, Winters disavows any professional expertise vis-à-vis Indian culture, declaring, “I am no ethnologist” (41). He nevertheless proceeds to offer a definition of “primitive religion,” pitting “culture” against “civilization” in terms very close to the line of reasoning articulated by the ethnographer Edward Sapir in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” According to Stocking, Sapir’s essay was so influential that it may be considered “a foundation document for the ethnographic sensibility of the 1920s” (“Ethnographic Sensibility” 217). From 1919 to 1924, parts of it appeared in several venues, including The Dial, The Dalhousie Review, and The American Journal of Sociology, thus exemplifying the interpenetration of cultural criticism and ethnographic writing that Stocking identifies as characteristic of the era. Winters’s review displays a similar conjunction, as he rehearses the dichotomy between primitive and modern religion postulated by nineteenth-century ethnographers: I am no ethnologist, but I take it that most primitive religion is rather definitely practical in its aims: it consist mainly of scientific formulae perpetuating the race and for getting three square meals a day. The gods are not spiritual qualities, but natural forces: they are not in any sense abstractions but are things one can lay ones hands on and control. The Indian controls rain and thunder by means of incantation to get crops; the modern scientist controls electricity by other means to construct engines which will make him felt hats in very rapid succession. Now the

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Consciously or not, Winters’s comical contrast of hat production with the cultivation of crops very closely echoes the example Sapir invented to demonstrate the decadence of contemporary American society. In his essay, Sapir compares a telephone operator, whom he calls “an appalling sacrifice to civilization” (92), to an Indian “salmon-spearer”: The Indian’s salmon-spearing is a culturally higher type of activity than that of the telephone girl or mill hand simply because there is normally no sense of spiritual frustration during its prosecution, no feeling of subservience to tyrannous yet largely inchoate demands, further because it works in naturally and smoothly with all the rest of the Indian’s activities instead of standing out as a desert patch of merely economic effort in the whole of life. (93)

In Sapir’s view, the case of Native Americans proves that “genuine culture” is not in any sense limited to Western nationalities or technologically advanced societies. On the contrary, such an “inherently harmonious, balanced, selfsatisfactory” (90) culture is more likely to exist in societies at a “lower level of civilization” (96) than our own. Winters echoes this sentiment as well, finding Indian religion “much more credible and dignified” than American Protestantism because the former is “knit to, rather than divorced from, all the other activities of the community” (41). As Stocking points out, although Sapir was an important pioneer in the systematic study and documentation of indigenous languages, his notion of “genuine culture” is marked by “a strong residual aroma of romantic primitivism” (“Ethnographic Sensibility” 217). Despite Winters’s strong aversion to “interpreters” who borrow Indian symbols and “give them a ‘meaning’ and usually . . . a damned sloppy one” (42), he too tends to idealize Native Americans. One level on which this idealization occurs is in relation to the notion of tradition, and in this respect Winters’s interest in the primitive resembles Eliot’s. As we have seen, Winters and Eliot completely diverge in their estimations of The Path on the Rainbow, yet both reviews offer striking endorsements of tradition. The primary source of Eliot’s displeasure with the anthology is that in his view it exemplifies the kind of romantic primitivism from which he wishes to distance

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himself while still affirming the importance of the primitive. Like Winters, Eliot believes it important for the poet “to learn from the savage,” but he also holds that the “savage . . . can be improved upon.” Eliot’s ideal poet is thus the last person to see the savage in a romantic light, or to yield to the weak credulity of crediting the savage with any gifts of mystical insight or artistic feeling that he does not possess himself. . . .The poet and the artist and the anthropologist will be the last people to tolerate the whooping brave, with his tale of maple sugar, as a drawing-room phenomenon. (1036)

What, then, is the importance of primitive culture to the modern artist? In Eliot’s view, knowledge of primitive art and poetry will help “revivify” contemporary culture because it extends the poet’s understanding of tradition to an unprecedented degree. According to Eliot, the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished, not merely produced) since its beginnings—in order to know what he is doing himself. He should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate the stratifications of history that cover savagery. (1036)

This declaration of what a poet should know about the past is remarkably similar to the more famous assertion Eliot makes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” A writer who possesses the “historical sense” writes “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (4). As others have pointed out, “War-Paint and Feathers” and “Tradition and the Individual Talent” are indeed companion pieces, appearing within one month of each other and touching on similar subjects.20 Frazer’s immense compendium of ethnographic data appealed to Eliot precisely because it offered a powerful means of widening the scope of tradition. Anthropology, and Frazer’s comparative method in particular, is, as Michael Levenson puts it, “a prosthesis for the dissociated sensibility” (196). Like Eliot, Winters seizes the occasion of his review of Path on the Rainbow to stress the importance of tradition and the “historical sense” to the arts. Thus he reserves his most extravagant praise for Native American art insofar as it embodies this notion of tradition:

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“The accumulated thunder of generations” and the “consciousness of an entire race” represent what is missing from contemporary America, and what Winters believes one may discover in Native American culture, provided one avoids the trap of “interpretation.” Although Winters and Eliot diverge rather drastically in their opinions of this particular anthology, they both accord a great deal of importance to primitive culture. As we have seen, Crane at times indulges a parallel yearning for the primitive as an antidote for too much civilization, though his desire to emulate the “wild man” would probably have smacked of the “weak credulity” Eliot finds so contemptible. And yet, Crane’s attraction to the rhetoric of ethnography is based less on a quest for “tradition,” as it is for Eliot and Winters, and more on his perception that it offers him a framework for a poetic fiction about accessing the primitive within. CHASING THE PRIMITIVE BODY “The Dance” begins under the sign of the human body, but it is a body abruptly removed. As if to snap the reader instantly to attention, the exotic male body of an American Indian sweeps boldly into and then out of view: The swift red flesh, a winter king— Who squired the glacier woman down the sky? She ran the neighing canyons all the spring; She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die. (62)

With a triplet of accented monosyllables (“swift red flesh”), Crane places us immediately in the presence of a body defined by its physicality—its powers of movement, its skin-color, its fleshliness. Yet this physical immediacy is very short-lived. The line itself is cut short, a tetrameter unit in a sequence of overwhelmingly pentameter quatrains, with the terminal dash dangling in place of the absent final foot so as to emphasize the dancer’s precipitous withdrawal. Confronted with the “flesh” of an unfamiliar race, the speaker steps back from the corporeal spectacle, first by bestowing an epithet (“winter

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king”) upon what he has just seen, then by posing an ambiguous question that both interrogates the dancer’s identity (Who is the winter king?) and signals the speaker’s disorientation (Did he really do what I think I saw him do?). Leaving the speaker’s questions unanswered, Crane repeats this pattern of an abrupt appearance coupled with an equally abrupt disappearance in the second half of the stanza. In the space of only two lines, Crane renders the “glacier woman’s” entire life-span, stressing her transience as the incarnation of seasonal cycles of growth and decay, and ending emphatically with her death, which yanks her, too, unceremoniously from the scene. Right at the point of entry to Crane’s evocation of what he calls, in a letter, “the pure Indian world” (341), we are confronted with a puzzling conjunction of immediacy and elusiveness, a dialectic of presence and absence that plays itself out in these early stanzas in a series of disappearing acts. The winter king swings into view only to be placed at a distance, then displaced completely by the glacier woman who is, in turn, rapidly removed from the scene. Attention then reverts to the male figure, but this time the speaker is granted only a partial view consisting of hands reaching out to a primitive stone altar: And in the autumn drouth, whose burnished hands With mineral wariness found out the stone Where prayers, forgotten, streamed the mesa sands? He holds the twilight’s dim, perpetual throne.

Mythical brows we saw retiring—loth, Disturbed and destined, into denser green. Greeting they sped us, on the arrow’s oath: Now lie incorrigibly what years between . . . (62)

Like the prayers his hands embody, the male figure is in danger of being “forgotten” even at the moment that his presence is affirmed. His “throne” is “perpetual,” but it hovers on the verge of invisibility, suffused with the “dim,” hazy aura of twilight. In the stanza that follows, Crane once again removes the Indians from view, as they “retire” from the speaker into an obscure wood. Like “squired,” the word from the opening stanza with which it phonemically resonates, “retiring” associates the Indians with the realm of culture rather than nature. Children of nature do not “squire” their partners or “retire” from view; ladies and gentlemen do. The archaic, high diction of “squired” suggests a stylized courtship scene subject to rules. These natives

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are ruled not by their passions, as the myth of primitive promiscuity would have it, but by what Walter Bagehot called the “cake of social custom” (qtd. in Herbert 144). And yet, in spite of this association with the constraints of social forms, Crane locates his invented Indian within a natural world suffused with eroticism. As he writes in the “Cape Hatteras” section of The Bridge, his speaker is in thrall To that deep wonderment, our native clay Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas

is “surcharged with sweetness” (77)—that is, with the erotic energy that comes alive in the scene of sacrifice in “The Dance,” when horns “sprout,” teeth “spark,” and “red fangs / And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air” (63). This eros-soaked atmosphere co-exists, however, with numerous tokens of a world ruled by ritual and custom. Crane’s representation of Native Americans thus depends upon the same dialectic of desire and restraint that Herbert argues is fundamental to the development of the ethnographic notion of culture, a parallel which I address at more length in connection with the poem’s motif of speed. Replaying the pattern of approach and withdrawal yet again, Crane represents the Indians in the act of an enthusiastic “greeting”—albeit one with a distinctly hostile air—and then asserts the insurmountable barrier of time that separates “us” from “them.” There are several contradictory movements to address here. On the one hand, “they” are moving away from “us,” a pronominal juxtaposition that enforces the divide between the Indians under observation and the group of non-Indians that includes poet, speaker, and audience. Yet while the Indians recede, their “greeting” advances toward “us” at high speed. To add to the confusion, although the speaker perceives the thing hurtling toward him as a “greeting,” the “arrow’s oath” on which it rides suggests, on the contrary, that he is being repulsed. Indeed, the involuted syntax and elided prepositions open this line to alternative designations of the verb’s object, with both “they sped a greeting to us” and “their greeting sped us away from them” as plausible grammatical constructions. All these factors heighten the ambiguity as to whether they are welcoming or fleeing us, or whether in fact we are fleeing them. I dwell on this curious double movement because of the way it sets the tone for the relation throughout “The Dance” between the subjective voice and “The Indian,” its object of desire. The primitive state of being that the speaker later calls the “tribal morn” is the cathexis of this section of

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the poem, but the degree to which the subjective voice feels it has access to the primitive always remains in question. Thus, although this preludial segment of “The Dance” concludes with an image of history as an absolute barrier between “us” and “them”—modern and primitive, Euro-American and Indian—the speaker trails off into an ellipsis only to follow in the succeeding stanza with a serene tableau of the primitive from which he has just declared he is shut out: There was a bed of leaves, and broken play; There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride— O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May; And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride. (62)

In this transitional moment linking prologue to quest, the speaker summons an idealized Pocahontas sporting in the woods who recalls the “wanton yong girle” evoked in the epigraph to “Powhatan’s Daughter.” The epigraph is taken from a proto-ethnographic account that includes the earliest transcriptions of any Algonquian language, William Strachey’s The History of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (1612): Pocahuntus, a well-featured but wanton yong girle . . . of the age of eleven or twelve years, get the boyes forth with her into the market place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning their heels upwards, whom she would followe, and wheele so herself, naked as she was, all the fort over. (51)21

The “incorrigible” years that separate the speaker from the primitive also come between the reader and Strachey’s text, with its archaic orthography and syntax (accentuated by Crane’s partial quotation of the original sentence). Yet the speaker (and, by implication, the reader) effortlessly overcomes these barriers, as if after sternly telling himself that the primitive is inaccessible, he hallucinates Pocahontas in order to assuage his desire. In the process, however, he elevates Pocahontas from the frisky girl of Strachey’s narrative into a dignified “Princess.” Strachey’s straightforward rhetoric of erotic exuberance—“wanton,” “wheele,” “falling,” “naked”—modulates into the more restrained, indirect eroticism of Crane’s verse. The compressed locution “broken play” suggests that we have come upon Pocahontas in the midst of a tryst, but the verse remains reticent, withholding from the reader any precise description of the actions of the “wanton yong girle.” And with the anaphora “There was,” Crane assumes the voice of nostalgic pastoralism,

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looking back wistfully at an idealized past while also being cognizant of its idealization. It is therefore misleading to say, as some readers do, that Crane simply “returns” to the aboriginal world of the Indians in “The Dance.”22 Whether Crane conceives of the primitive as a psychological state generated by modern subjectivity, or an objective social condition located in either the remote past or in contemporary non-Western cultures, the primitive remains, in “The Dance,” an extremely elusive, mercurial object of desire. Crane’s speaker yearns to recover a lost authenticity, but his efforts are neither finally satisfied nor ever completely abandoned. Thus even in the tableau of Pocahontas as virginal bride, in which the speaker appears to possess her, however briefly, the veil that signifies her bridal status is also a mediating screen, a token of secrecy that comes between the speaker and the primitive. On the one hand we are given intimate glimpses of her body—her “brown lap,” her “flanks.” We even manage to penetrate her psyche, revealing her hidden “pride.” Once the quest begins in earnest in the very next stanza, however, she transmutes once again into a highly elusive phantasm. In the first phase of the quest (stanzas five through seven), in which the speaker embarks on a nocturnal river journey, it is not even clear that Pocahontas is the object of pursuit: I left the village for dogwood. By the canoe Tugging below the mill-race, I could see Your hair’s keen crescent running, and the blue First moth of evening take wing stealthily. What laughing chains the water wove and threw! I learned to catch the trout’s moon whisper; I Drifted how many hours I never knew, But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die,— And one star, swinging, take its place, alone, Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass— Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn. I left my sleek boat nibbling margin grass . . . (62)

As the speaker drifts into the realm of the irrational, losing track of time, he learns the secrets of nature and, like an Indian, “catch[es] the trout’s moon whisper.” For yet another time, he watches the Indian disappear as

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Pocahontas’s hair fades from view. Pocahontas’s presence here dissolves into a series of tropes that one after another slip away from the subjective consciousness. She is first seen in the form of her hair, but in Crane’s phrase, “your hair’s keen crescent,” the figurative relationship between hair and crescent remains ambiguous. Is the shape of her hair being likened to a crescent moon, or is the moon, as it appears to streak across the sky, being likened to her hair? In fact, this periphrasis is even more elusive, for the speaker perceives this moon-hair not in the heavens, but as reflected in the water of the “mill-race” beside the canoe. Moon then gives way to star, which in turn gives way to dawn. Pocahontas is thus heavily mediated by perceptual screens that place her at several removes from the perceiving consciousness: a reflected image, not of Pocahontas herself, but of the crescent moon, which is in turn a figure for her hair. I COULD NOT STOP “The Dance” dwells repeatedly on situations in which the Indian object of desire is perpetually just out of reach, an elusive object perceived only in imperfect glimpses or through various forms of mediating screens. Above all, the overriding motif of the poem is speed. Everything occurs in rapid motion, from the “swift red flesh” of the opening line, to the “greeting” hurtling toward the speaker on the Indian’s arrow, to Pocahontas’s hair “running” in the river, to the “cyclone” that “threshes” Maquokeeta’s headdress, “swooping” down his back. The speed of the Indians is forever pulling them away from the speaker’s gaze, and the speaker is forever grasping after the elusive goal of the primitive that they represent. With the coming of dawn, the mountain-climbing phase of the quest begins and the pace of the verse quickens, accentuating this motif of speed. Presaging the frenzied sacrificial climax, Crane renders the speaker’s headlong rush of motion in stanzas eight through ten: I took the portage climb, then chose A further valley-shed; I could not stop. Feet nozzled wat’ry webs of upper flows; One white veil gusted from the very top. O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge; Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends And northward reaches in that violet wedge Of Adirondacks!—wisped of azure wands,

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As the speaker announces that he is in the grip of an irresistible force compelling him onward (“I could not stop”), the prosody itself accelerates, with two consecutive lines enjambing in stanza nine. Most dramatically, there is an enjambment across stanzas nine and ten, only the second instance among the entire twenty-six quatrains of the section that Crane violates the selfcontained order of his stanzaic form. Just as the topography “bends” and “reaches,” so does the versification shift into high gear in this bravura passage. The trans-stanzaic enjambment also harbors a squinting predicate (“wisped of azure wands”) that serves as the object of two subjects, one before and one after the stanza break. That is, just as the Adirondacks are “wisped” by the “azure wands” of the sky, so too is the “I” of the poem “wisped” (behind which one hears “whisked”) by those same magical forces as he traverses the landscape at a stunning, vertiginous speed. Why, however, is the quester in such a rush? What is the impetus behind all this rapid motion, behind, indeed, the accelerating rhythms of the dance that serves as the subtle, unifying conceit of the entire section? As Peter Brooks’s explains, in late Romantic writing the dancing woman serves as “the very symbol of poetry, of symbol-making itself ” (259). Mallarmé’s meditations on Loië Fuller are only the most famous example of this. The other prominent instance of an artist viewing the dance in such exalted terms is Yeats, who repeatedly turns to the dancer as a symbol of perfection, “combining visual realization and idea in a moment of ‘bodily thought’” (259), as in the famous closing of “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (214). Brooks goes on to address, however, the subsequent reaction against this trope: The late Romantic version of the dancer’s body as the incarnation of something ineffable is marked by a certain desperation, and much twentieth-century art of the body to a degree reacts against this by affirming the bodiliness of the body. (260)

Crane’s dance of speed, with its recurrent imagery of bodies rushing forward, partakes of this reaction, and is not, like Yeats’s dance, a symbol of the “ineffable.” By way of confirmation, one should recall Crane’s fondness for the

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vigorous Russian dance known as the “gotzotsky.”23 Like this emphatically “bodily,” far from ineffable dance, movement in this section of The Bridge is more akin to the “images of surging forces” (37) that Christopher Herbert examines in the writings of anthropologists and other social scientists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The provocative thesis of Herbert’s Culture and Anomie is that the modern ethnographic idea of culture—which remains notoriously difficult to define—is a fundamentally “unstable amalgam of empiricism and metaphysics” (300), which was developed in the nineteenth century as a “scientific rebuttal” of the “myth of a state of ungoverned human desire” (29). Seeking an alternative to the social vision of original-sin theology, in which society is conceived as “an artificial restraint imposed by necessity” (35) upon the anarchy of human desire, progressive social thinkers—from Tylor to Malinowski—postulated the idea of “culture” as a “complex whole,” a semiological system with its own intrinsic principles of order. Accordingly, these theorists strove to disprove the old image of primitive peoples as ruled wholly by their passions. As Herbert explains, Anthropological theory in its mature form disavows the myth of boundless desire, but one of the paramount functions of anthropology in its early modern stage was in effect to validate scientifically this very myth and thus the theory of social control with which it has always been inseparably connected. This it did by claiming to locate this hypothetical state empirically in contemporary “savage” societies and, on a more speculative basis, in Europeans’ own primitive past. The assumption was that social control was effectively nonexistent in preliterate tribal societies, and that as a result desire manifested itself there in an atmosphere of what one nineteenth century commentator termed “brutal uncontrolled freedom” (60).

During the late-nineteenth century, however, this “myth of unbridled primitive desire” is replaced by “something like its very opposite” (64): the belief, in Tylor’s words, that “life in the uncivilized world is fettered at every turn by chains of custom” (qtd. in Herbert 64). There is thus “a broad reversal of assumptions in which ‘savage’ society is transformed from a void of institutional control where desire is rampant to a spectacle of controls exerted systematically upon the smallest details of daily life” (65). This constituted an important step in the progress of cultural relativism, for if non-Western societies are viewed as acting within the constraints of social rules, they are no different from modern societies in which human beings exist within social systems that place checks on desire.

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Despite this paradigmatic shift in the conception of primitive society, from an arena of untrammeled desire to one intensely rule-bound, social theorists continued to employ the imagery of “surging forces contained or redirected” (37) in order to describe cultural phenomenon. Herbert explains this persistence as a manifestation of the dialectic between the idea of culture and unlimited desire, the two poles which he views as “reciprocal, complementary elements of a single pattern of discourse, albeit a conflict-laden and necessarily unstable one” (29). The question arises, then, as to whether the Native Americans depicted in “The Dance” reflect the old paradigm, in which primitives incarnate “potentially boundless human desire”; whether, by contrast, they inhabit a world bound by “the chains of custom”; or whether, like the social thinkers surveyed by Herbert, Crane places restraint and desire in dialectic tension. Desire is a prominent concern of much of Crane’s poetry, perhaps most visibly in “Voyages,” the suite of love poems composed between 1921 and 1924 among which most critics agree are some of Crane’s most successful lyrics.24 “Voyages II” is especially of interest in connection with the dialectic of desire and restraint, for it begins with a trio of tropes very much akin to what Herbert calls “boundless desire”: —And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings (35)

Even in “Voyages,” however, Crane juxtaposes these evocations of boundlessness against the idea of restraint, as when, in “Voyages V,” the speaker comes up against the “merciless white blade,” a boundary that defines “the hard sky limits” (38) that all lovers must eventually confront. In “The Dance,” the very first image of “swift red flesh” strongly suggests unrestrained desire, a “surging force” located specifically in the body of an Indian. This is echoed in the first description of the “glacier woman,” who is figured as a vigorous horse that “ran the neighing canyons” (62). In general, the quest described in “The Dance” is pervaded by speed as a trope for desire. A closer look reveals, however, that Crane couples these moments of acceleration with the contrary imagery of restraint. For instance, the canoe in which the quester drifts is first seen “tugging below the mill-race” (62), straining against some unnamed tether. The river that carries the quester into Indian territory is also metaphorically restrained by “laughing chains the water wove and threw” (62). So too is Pocahontas’s hair, which incarnates the urge to boundlessness as a “fleet” and “running” crescent moon, also brought under control, as it concludes its sequence of shape-changes somewhat tamed, as a

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“swinging” star that is last seen “cupped,” or contained, among trees: it “takes its place, alone, / Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass” (62). Crane’s poem thus appears to oscillate between tropes of restraint and desire. And although the Native Americans Crane depicts are viewed as physical, erotic beings, they are also written of in terms that suggest that they are indeed “ruled by custom.” For instance, to ask who has “squired” the glacier woman implies a ritualistic, orderly world of social customs, as I have already discussed. Pocahontas’s “veil” also indicates the existence of courtship rituals. All of stanza four, with its tableau of the “bride” and her concealed “pride,” suggests notions of modesty and restraint completely contrary to the notion of unbridled desire. The veil may symbolize concealment, but it is also one of those ethnographic “facts” that indicate a ritual-bound cultural order. Finally, restraint and order are also manifested in the tightly controlled prosody itself, with its carefully paced and rhyming lines of iambic pentameter, neatly contained (with only two exceptions) within the confines of the quatrain structure. This structure of containment is, however, always in tension with the demands of eros. As the poem shifts to the scene of sacrifice, the body of Maquokeeta takes center stage and Crane again turns to speed as a trope for ungoverned desire. The quester watches, for instance, as a storm gathers, making a birch tree’s “fingers fly.” Crane even endows his speaker with the ability to detect spasmatic movement within the body, as Maquokeeta is struck by lightning in stanza fourteen: And every tendon scurries toward the twangs Of lightning deltaed down your saber hair. Now snaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air . . . (63)

In this moment of combustion, body and nature rush toward each other, producing the sharp resonant sound of a “twang,” an echoic word commonly used to represent the noise made by a bow as its arrow is released. Crane’s “twangs / Of lightning” allude both to Cupid’s arrows of eros and to the received iconography of Native Americans deploying bows and arrows. This iconography surfaces earlier in “The Dance” in the “arrow’s oath” on which their “greeting” sped; in the arrows that pierce both Maquokeeta and speaker; and in the coda to the poem, when the speaker asks whether arrows still “thirst and leap” once the Indian has “vanished.” Using arrows as tropes for desire, Crane is grafting the rhetoric of ethnography onto a Romantic tradition of figuration, as found, for instance, in Coleridge’s

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“Lines Written in the Manner of Spenser”: “When twanged an arrow from love’s mystic string” (81). This use of “twang” as a signal of desire may also help explain one of Crane’s notoriously elliptical passages in “Lachrymae Christi,” a poem composed between 1924 and 1925 that parallels “The Dance” in many ways, for it too portrays the “charred and riven stakes” (20) of a scene of sacrifice, in this case of a Christ-Dionysus figure. “From flanks unfended,” Crane writes, “Twanged red perfidies of spring / Are trillion on the hill” (19). Here “twanged” stands in for “plucked,” as metaphorical flowers are plucked from the ground, just as the strings of a musical instrument are “plucked” or “twanged.” Behind this “pluck-twang” is the implied sound of the arrows of desire that shoot toward the “unmangled target smile” with which Crane ends what Joseph Riddel has called his “most outrageous” (103) poem. Speed also appears as a trope for desire in the climax of the sacrificial rite in “The Dance.” In this segment of the poem, Crane emphasizes the speaker’s observational vantage by re-introducing the first-person pronoun, which is suppressed during Maquokeeta’s initial appearance in the poem in stanzas twelve through fifteen. Crane begins by evoking one of those “effervescent social environments” (qtd. in C. Steiner 224) that Durkheim associated with totemic ritual: Spears and assemblies: black drums thrusting on— O yelling battlements,—I, too, was liege To rainbows currying each pulsant bone: Surpassed the circumstance, danced out the siege! And buzzard-circleted, screamed from the stake; I could not pick the arrows from my side. Wrapped in that fire, I saw more escorts wake— Flickering, sprint up the hill groins like a tide. I heard the hush of lava wrestling your arms, And stag teeth foam about the raven throat; Flame cataracts of heaven in seething swarms Fed down your anklets to the sunset’s moat. (64)

“Drums thrusting,” “escorts” that “sprint,” “seething swarms” of fire—all of these are consistent with the motif of “surging forces” Crane employs in his figuration of desire. These stanzas follow immediately upon the crucial passage discussed above in which the speaker implores the “Medicine-man” to

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“dance us back the tribal morn” with a “lie” that creates an illusion of primitive origins. The conjured illusion is the “spears and assemblies” of the primitive crowd in the grip of mass hysteria. This is “tribal morn” not as pastoral Eden but as the primal horde that Freud describes in both Totem and Taboo (1913) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), the latter of which is the single work by Freud that we know for certain Crane owned.25 Following Gustave Le Bon, Freud argues that group dynamics may precipitate a regression to the state of the primal horde. As Le Bon puts it: By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings. (qtd. in Freud 12)

Crane’s “lie” also finds an echo in Freud’s recapitulation of the argument of Totem and Taboo. As Freud himself explains in Group Psychology, he attempted to show that the fortunes of [the primal] horde have left indestructible traces upon the history of human descent; and, especially, that the development of totemism, which comprises in itself the beginnings of religion, morality, and social organization, is connected with the killing of the chief by violence and the transformation of the paternal horde into a community of brothers. (69)

In the course of describing the “totemic community of brothers” (87) who murder the despotic father, Freud postulates the birth of what he terms the “heroic myth”: It was then, perhaps, that some individual, in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group and take over the father’s part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance was achieved in his imagination. The poet disguised the truth with lies in accordance with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. The hero was a man who by himself had slain the father—the father who still appeared in the myth as a totemic monster. (87)

What appealed to Crane was the proposition that “the poet disguised the truth with lies in accordance with his longing.” But the curious thing, the

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element that shows more than anything else Crane’s contradictory attitude toward the idea of the primitive, is that this illusion is very abruptly punctured by the subjective voice, which reasserts its presence and point of view with the sudden reappearance of the “I.” Instead of fully drawing this scene of the primal horde, we are taken away from it, moving precipitously from the “yelling battlements” to the complicated conceit revolving around the overdetermined word “currying”: “I, too, was liege / To rainbows currying each pulsant bone” (64). “Currying” is a complex word with multiple and contradictory significations, and Crane appears to be drawing on several of these simultaneously. In the simplest possible terms, one may paraphrase this passage as: Like you in your death throes, Maquokeeta, I was subservient to a force acting upon my body. In other words, the entire phrase, “rainbows currying each pulsant bone,” is a complex periphrasis for fate and mortality. The OED records instances in which “currying” describes both soothing actions, such as the grooming of both horses and humans (from which derives the idiomatic “to curry favor,” or, to sooth with flattery) and, by contrast, violent acts of beating. All usages are traceable to various techniques of preparing leather hides, and Crane summons this association as part of his project of figuring the animality of the human body as it undergoes its ritual travail. There are also obsolete significations in which “curry” corresponds to the parts of an animal fed to hunting dogs, and to the act of disemboweling game. Crane has thus hidden archaic references to violent acts of animal sacrifice within his catachrestic figure of the “currying” of bones. This figure also manifests the dialectic of desire and restraint that I have been tracing, since the “thrusting” of the drums pairs off with the “currying” of bones, another “surging force” balanced by a soothing, restraining hand. The act of a rainbow “currying” bones is, like many of Crane’s catachrestic figures, hard if not impossible to visualize, but it may be viewed as a rather eccentric trope for the idea of covenant. As Lee Edelman has proposed, drawing on Geoffrey Hartman’s discussion of covenant in Wordsworth, Crane’s rainbows (numerous in The Bridge) point toward a “covenantal poetics” (243) in which the sacrificial act of binding “recognizes both violence and reconstructive renewal” (185). The “currying” of bones is thus both a violent and reassuring act, just as the “currying” of an animal skin may be viewed as both a violent alteration of its body and a refining of that body. Like the tendon that “scurries,” the “pulsant bone” is Crane’s synecdoche for the human body—a body pulsating with the erotic rhythms of life.26 Bones are not customarily thought of as pulsating. They are the fixed core of the body, a core which, moreover, remains invisible, except in death.

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Bones may be viewed, then, as a figure for the primitive instincts that Freud believed were buried within the human mind, just as “survivals” of primitive social phenomena were believed by Tylor and others to be evident in certain contemporary human customs, such as the handshake or the salutation upon sneezing. If the bones represent the primitive within, then a “pulsant bone” is the primitive that continues to live within the modern self. To curry these bones is to groom the “savage impulses” that remain “dormant in the heart of civilized man,” always ready to “spring to life again,” as the anthropologist R. R. Marett wrote in 1917 (qtd. in Kuklick 119). Crane’s covenant with the body is simultaneously a covenant with the primitive substratum of the human psyche that the bones represent. The other instance in which Crane figures desire as a surging force occurs as the speaker projects himself into Maquokeeta’s position, speaking from this fused perspective as they undergo their phoenix-like immolation. In the midst of this conflagration, the speaker-Maquokeeta sees, in a kind of hallucination, “escorts” who “wake” and, “Flickering, sprint up the hill groins like a tide” (64). Just who these escorts are remains tantalizingly unclear, but we may gain some sense of what Crane wished this phantasm to suggest by applying interpretive pressure on the word “escort.” In its original sense, an escort is a military term for those who guide and protect another party. Protection and accompaniment are an escort’s function, whether in this older sense, or in the more recent one (since the late nineteenth century) of a man who accompanies a woman in public, often indicating his status as suitor. In some cases, of course, an escort accompanies one to a dance, and in this sense “escort” and “squire”—the term of ritual courtship that surfaces earlier in the poem—are in fact virtually synonymous. The “escorts” seen by the “I” as he is engulfed by fire are guardians, figures who will help guide and protect him. They are also ephemeral apparitions, hallucinatory images “flickering” through the ascending flames as they move rapidly out of his field of vision, very much in the way Maquokeeta is himself first seen as a fleeting image of “swift red flesh.” These escorts may represent other Indians who will accompany Maquokeeta, since Crane refers to “more escorts,” suggesting that there were already others present, or that, perhaps, Maquokeeta, who is the speaker’s “escort” to the aboriginal past, is being joined by other Indian escorts. The important thing is that the speaker here imagines that he is being “escorted,” possibly by a group of Indians, to the consummation he desires. The whole idea of escort, of being carried over or transported to another location, suggests the ethnographic situation of an outsider in quest of access to another cultural context. An escort is someone who accompanies one into unfamiliar

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or dangerous territory, and thus contributes to the ethnographic scenario underlying the action of “The Dance.” If one views the “escorts” surging upward “like a tide” as a trope for desire, one must, once again, keep in mind that the implied, allegorical courtship ritual suggested by this term concludes on a strong note of containment. The final figure for this containment occurs in the last stanza of “The Dance”: We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their farms, In cobalt desert closures made our vows . . . Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms, The serpent with the eagle in the boughs. (65)

There is a very strong sense of finality and poetic closure here, as the reader rests momentarily on the heavily accented totems, with each item—serpent, eagle, bough—clicking into place in the orderly prosodic structure, and with the Indian’s “folded” arms serving as an emblem of this closure. To this markedly hieratic moment, Crane also adds a heavy dosage of self-reflexivity, for the “desert closures” represent not only the enclosed private space within which “Brave” and poetic quester make their “vows”; they are the poetic closures Crane everywhere flaunts (even as he selectively violates form) in this tightly orchestrated prosodic performance. He is also, of course, making one of those “closural allusions” that signify, in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s words, “termination and stability” (172). Even here, however, Crane balances constraint with desire, as the gesture of dancing “beyond their farms” suggests the urge to overcome artificial social conventions. Thus the dialectic of boundlessness and limitation makes its final appearance, as Crane’s dancers break through barriers in order, paradoxically, to dwell within their own bounded condition. There is also, of course, a declaration of solidarity: “we”—poets and those like them who are unafraid of cultivating the “primitive within”— stand with Native Americans against “civilization,” here represented by “their farms.” At first glance it is somewhat surprising that Crane would oppose his utopian primitivism to agriculture, rather than, for instance, an image of a modern city, as he does in the nightmarish subway ride in “The Tunnel.” In the context of the “frontier,” however, farming did indeed represent the forces of civilization. All told, this stanza suggests that Crane has lost the skeptical edge to his primitivism that I have been arguing has been largely overlooked, and that “The Dance” ends on an unequivocal note of nostalgic pastoralism, albeit an odd one that paints agriculture as its antagonist. Yet

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this would, once again, simplify the complex lineaments of The Bridge. In a letter, Crane once called “The Dance” an “anti-climax” (429), and we may begin to understand what he meant by this if we notice how this closing stanza of “The Dance” reverberates in the climax of The Bridge, the final lines of “Atlantis,” which are also the concluding lines of the entire poem: —One Song, One Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay, Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring The serpent with the eagle in the leaves . . . Whispers antiphonal in azure swing. (108)

The key points of similarity here are the nearly verbatim repetition of the very last line of “The Dance.” There are, however, two important differences. First, “Atlantis” substitutes “leaves” for “bough”; second, “Atlantis” trails off into an ellipsis that ends in a question mark. Dropping the word “boughs,” Crane has chosen to avoid evoking Frazer’s anthropological opus at this crucial final moment of the poem. Certainly this is not a metrical choice, since both words are stressed monosyllables. Opting for “leaves,” Crane has also decided to forego the potentially rich off-rhyme of “rainbows” with “boughs.” Although Crane has chosen to close The Bridge with an allusion to Native American totemism, he has converted that allusion into a distancing gesture, one that separates himself from Frazer and what he once derided as Eliot’s “useless archaeology” (CPS 218).27 Moreover, if “boughs” would have alluded to Frazer and Eliot, “leaves” invokes the contrary presence of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. “The Dance” ends on a firm note of closure, with its primitive totemic emblems—serpent and eagle against the backdrop of boughs—in hieratic arrangement. “Atlantis,” by contrast, repeats what is essentially the same tableau in the context of the open-ended conclusion to The Bridge: a drifting enigmatic ellipsis, a question mark, and ambiguous “whispers” that “swing,” leaving the reader suspended between the closure represented by the longed for unity of “One Song,” and the possibility that such unity is an unrealizable illusion, just as the primitive may itself be an illusion. TWO MYTHS OF PROMISCUITY, PRIMITIVE AND HOMOSEXUAL The “vows” of the dancers in “The Dance” allude to the gay subtext of the poem, a dimension of this section that needs to be addressed to gain the full resonance of desire in The Bridge. In the context of the courtship rituals

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and highly eroticized landscapes that mark “The Dance,” it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that quester and Indian “Brave” are exchanging marriage vows. One does not have to agree with Thomas Yingling’s somewhat outré proposal that Maquokeeta is a “berdache” (the French Canadian term for a Native American transvestite) to acknowledge the homosexual scenario of desire around which “The Dance” revolves.28 After all, although Pocahontas is the ostensible “bride” of the poem, the erotic center of “The Dance” is the quester’s agitated participation in the agonies of the dying Maquokeeta. Echoing Yingling’s assertion that Crane’s sacrificial victim resembles “a St. Sebastian of the American West” (220), Robert K. Martin terms this scene a “sadomasochistic vision of a Sebastian-like Liebestod” (Review 124). There is little doubt that Crane’s assimilation of Maquokeeta to the iconography of St. Sebastian connotes homosexual desire, as Sebastian had been, since at least the Victorian period, the favorite saint of gay men. This association of Sebastian with homosexuality was so well-established that when Eliot sent a draft of “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” to Conrad Aiken in 1914, he felt compelled to dissociate the poem from homosexual desire, protesting, “Only there’s nothing homosexual about this” (267). Oscar Wilde, for instance, with whose work Crane was infatuated at an early age, swooned over Guido Reni’s San Sebastian. He also penned this valediction for John Keats: As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree, and, though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens. (5)

Wilde’s “brown boy” and the “burnished” body of Maquokeeta are striking the same pose of homosexual martyrdom.29 One may argue that an allusion to St. Sebastian is not, of necessity, an indication of homosexuality, covert or not, and that “The Dance” may be read without any reference to homosexual desire, as it had been for many years until gay studies reinvigorated Crane criticism. Samuel R. Delany, however, has offered what is probably the most persuasive case for reading Crane’s poetry as being deliberately crafted so that a gay audience would find its homosexual content quite evident, even while most other readers might overlook the cues. Delany’s elegant argument is based on his postulation of “homosexual genres,” literary forms “structured so that straight, gay, male, or female readers and critics can read the homosexuality out of them,

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for whatever reason, whenever it becomes necessary or convenient” (200). The most obvious example of this “genre” is the love poem in which the gender of the beloved is left ambiguous, as is the case in Crane’s “Voyages” and “The Harbor Dawn” section of The Bridge. In the latter, for example, the speaker describes his lover without ever using an “explicit sign of the feminine” (201). For readers sensitive to this code of absence, the poem is clearly about homosexual desire. As Delany puts it, “the rhetorical lengths to which the author has gone not to specify the gender is its positive sign” (201). Delany’s approach is subtle enough to allow him to grant that a heterosexual reading of Crane is not in and of itself inaccurate; it is, instead, “an alternate reading the poet has left, carefully set up by the text of the poem, precisely for heterosexual readers . . . or, indeed, for any critic, gay or straight, who had to discuss or write about the poem in public—to take advantage of ” (202). Even so, Delany believes the homosexual reading is more “poignant” and “marginally the richer” because it acknowledges the “silence surrounding homosexuality” (202). Moreover, given the vastly increased visibility of gay subject-matter that characterizes our present moment, he sees “no reason for the heterosexual critic . . . not to have access to the homosexual reading” (206) of Crane’s poetry. “The Dance” does not fit easily under the rubric of any of Delany’s postulated “homosexual genres.” Without question not a love poem, it is in some ways similar to the barroom encounter between sailor and poet depicted in the “Cutty Sark” section of The Bridge, which Delany categorizes as a “narrative that takes place in a world where homosexuality is never mentioned and is presumed not to exist—but where the incidents that occur have no other satisfying explanation” (202). Because it engages the myth of primitive promiscuity, “The Dance” also has affinities with what Delany identifies as another homosexual form: narratives of “rampant male (heterosexual) promiscuity” (202), such as Tom Jones, in which homosexual incidents are implied but not specified. Crane’s allusions to primitive promiscuity point toward the parallel construction of homosexuality as a social or medical pathology, one symptom of which is promiscuity. This notion of homosexual promiscuity is particularly evident in the early literature of sexology. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, for instance, asserts that sexuality in homosexual men “manifests itself, as a rule, abnormally early, and thereafter with abnormal power” (288), and he dwells on the “abnormally powerful feeling of lustful pleasure” (288) present in homosexual men. “As a rule,” he states, they “are subject to sexual hypersensitivity” (308). Promiscuity has long been associated with male homosexuality, but this is a generalization that “scarcely lives up to examination” (Weeks 115). As Crane’s legendary exploits on the waterfronts

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of New York, Marseilles, and Havana show, he was himself drawn to the myth of homosexual promiscuity. And yet, in a 1927 exchange with Winters, he also shows his awareness that this was a social fiction. Responding angrily to Winters’s implied critique of his homosexuality, Crane sought to disabuse him of the stereotype: One doesn’t have to turn to homosexuals to find instances of missing sensibilities. Of course I’m sick and tired of all this talk about balls and cunts in criticism. It’s obvious that balls are needed, and that Leonardo [da Vinci] had ’em—at least the records of the Florentine prisons, I’m told, say so. You don’t seem to realize that the whole topic is something of a myth anyway, and is consequently modified in the characteristics of the image by each age in each civilization. (338)

Just as Native Americans are depicted in “The Dance” in ways that both reinforce and contradict the myth of primitive promiscuity, so too are Crane’s coded references to homosexual desire in “The Dance” both allusions to and critiques of the parallel myth of homosexual promiscuity. TEPOZTLÁN: THE LAND OF OZ The last stage of Crane’s relationship with Native Americans, both as idea and reality, coincides with the months he lived in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship during 1930 and 1931. At this point, however, he had the opportunity to overcome his ignorance of Indian cultures through first-hand contact. Even when he questions his capacity to “fathom the Indian,” as he does in the following letter to Waldo Frank, it is clear that Crane conceives of this experience as a matter of great importance to his work as a poet: I doubt if I will ever be able to fathom the Indian really. It may be a dangerous quest, also. I’m pretty sure it is, in fact. But humanity is so unmechanized here still, so immediate and really dignified (I’m speaking of the Indians, peons, country people—not the average mestizo) that it is giving me an entirely fresh perspective. And whether immediately creative or not, more profound than Europe gave me. . . .[Crane’s ellipses] This is truly “another world.” (468–9)

This conviction that there is something “dangerous” about his desire to understand “the Indian” of course appealed to such an inveterate risk-taker as Crane. Yet there is also the sense that Crane was not able to free himself

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of many of the stereotypes about Native Americans that he previously possessed. In many ways, the Indian Crane met in Mexico was not very different than the one he invented for The Bridge. One of the most vivid pictures we have of Crane’s impression of Indian culture comes in the letters he wrote about his visits to the village of Tepoztlán. Approximately sixty miles from Mexico City, Tepoztlán became an important site for ethnographic research during the 1920s, first when Mexican indigenistas grew interested in the village’s Nahuatl-speaking inhabitants, and then when Robert Redfield, one of Edward Sapir’s students, arrived in 1926 to conduct fieldwork. Redfield’s study of the Tepoztecans, whom he calls “Indians of almost pure blood” (30), spawned two additional popular books, Stuart Chase’s Mexico and Carlton Beals’s Mexican Maize, both of which Crane was familiar with. Taken to the village in September 1931 by Milton Rourke, an archaeologist familiar with the indigenous language Nahuatl (Fisher 464), Crane calls his visit “five of the most absorbing days of my life” (qtd. in Unterecker 690). They arrive in time for the annual festival of Tepoxtéco, the eponymous king of the pre-Conquest Tepoztecans (Redfield 123) who Crane mistakenly calls the “ancient Aztec god of pulque” (481) in a 1931 letter. Echoing Redfield, Crane is impressed that the villagers are “all pure unadulterated Aztec” (481), although he is also fascinated by the syncretic character of their culture, noting that the “barbaric service” is held on the roof of the cathedral. Listening to a drum and flute alternating with church bells, Crane is struck by the “two voices, still in conflict . . . the idol’s and the Cross” (481). And yet, he understands that the relationship between the indigenous and European traditions is much more complex than a simple “conflict,” since he notes with pleasure that the participants in the service also attend mass. Crane’s description of the evening sky begins to suggest parallels between his perception of the festival and the setting of “The Dance.” Asking his correspondent to try if he can to “possibly imagine such a night,” Crane describes how the lightning flickered over the eastern horizon while a crescent moon fell into the west. And between the two a trillion stars glittered overhead! It was truly the Land of Oz, with the high valley walls in the Wizard’s circle. Rockets went whizzing up—to be answered by other rockets far up and over from the lofty temple. (481)

Lightning and a crescent moon that “fell into the west” are, of course, prominent components of Crane’s poem, as is the word “flickered.” Crane’s comparison of

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the scene with the “Land of Oz,” which he resorts to several times in a number of different letters, may seem, at first glance, somewhat incongruous. One must keep in mind that this remark substantially pre-dates the advent of the famous film, so that Crane’s allusion is to L. Frank Baum’s popular series of children’s books (published between 1900 and 1917), and to the stage adaptations that began to appear as early as 1901. What is striking is that with this allusion to Oz, Crane associates his experience with the landscape of utopia, the purely imaginary realm of a childhood fantasy of escape. On the other hand, Crane may be thinking primarily of how the magic of the “Wizard” compares to the magical thinking of a primitive culture. As the ritual progresses, Crane focuses on the introduction of an especially noteworthy prop, an ancient drum: But the most enthralling of all was the addition of another drum—this being the ancient Aztec drum, pre-Conquest and guarded year after year from the destruction of the priests and conquerors, that how many hundreds of times had been beaten to propitiate the god, Tepoxtéco, the patron and protector of this people. A large wooden cylinder, exquisitely carved and showing a figure with animal head, upright, and walking through thick woods,—it lay horizontally on the floor of the roof, resounding to two heavily padded drum sticks before the folded knees of one of the Indians. (482)

The drum Crane describes almost certainly corresponds to the instrument Redfield identifies as the teponaztli, a “horizontal wooden double-slotted drum” used strictly for ritual purposes (47). Moreover, in Redfield’s opinion, “one of the two teponaztlis remaining in Tepoztlan has every appearance of being an actual pre-Columbian artifact” (47). Beyond this rather startling parallel between the observations of Crane and Redfield, the importance of the drum is that Crane describes it as an art object, which shows that he perceives it as something both profoundly primitive and extremely sophisticated aesthetically. It is also noteworthy that Crane draws attention to the “figure with animal head” carved on the drum’s surface, since this totemic emblem recalls his allusion to totemism in his poem. The climax of the ritual, and of Crane’s account, comes as dawn approaches. To fully appreciate Crane’s excitement at the turn of events, the passage must be quoted in full: Suddenly, as it was getting lighter and lighter and excitement was growing more and more intense, one of the Indians who had been playing

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it put the drum sticks into my hands and nodded toward the amazing instrument. It seemed too good to be true, really, that I, who had expected to be thrown off the roof when I entered the evening before, should now be invited to actually participate. And actually I did! I not only beat the exact rhythm with all due accents, which they had been keeping up for hours; I even worked in an elaboration, based on the lighter tatoo of the more modern drum of the evening before. This, with such ponderous sticks, was exhausting to the muscles of the forearm; but I had the pleasure of pleasing them so that they almost embraced me. They did, in fact, several of them—put their arms around my shoulders and walk back and forth the whole length of the roof, when at the astronomical hour of six the whole place seemed to go mad in the refulgence of full day. It is something to hear bells rung, but it is inestimably better to see the sextons wield the hammers, swinging on them with the full weight of their entire bodies like frantic acrobats—while a whole bevy of rockets shower into such a vocal sunrise! (482)

Declaring that this experience “seemed too good to be true,” it is as if Crane is acknowledging the unlikeliness of the scenario that he had dreamed up in “The Dance” ever becoming a reality. After all, the identification with Maquokeeta that he had imagined is coming as close to actually occurring as would be possible. As in his poem, Crane moves from observer to participant. And just as he imagines in “The Dance,” the moment of ritual catharsis is accomplished through rhythm: A distant cloud, a thunder-bud—it grew, That blanket of the skies: the padded foot Within,—I heard it; ’til its rhythm drew, —Siphoned the black pool from the heart’s hot root! (63)

In these lines, “rhythm” does double duty as an attribute of both the represented drum-beat and Crane’s own poetry. That is, Crane is implicitly identifying his prosodic skills with the powers of primitive ritual. There can be little doubt that in Crane’s gleeful account of his inventive and crowdpleasing drumming, he is also thinking of his role as a poet, a practitioner of rhythmic sounds. The release of tension at this juncture of the poem, in which the “heart” (not only the quester’s, but human emotion in general, as the definite article suggests) is purged of an oppressive force, is matched by Crane’s relief at being “embraced” rather than assaulted by the Tepoztecans. It remains unclear whether Crane is embellishing here so as to make the

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gesture of acceptance all the more melodramatic, or whether there really was an atmosphere of potential menace. As Stocking points out, however, Redfield himself was forced to flee when Cristero rebels (remnants of the recent Mexican revolution) attacked the village, leaving several casualties (“Ethnographic Sensibility” 232). Crane’s impression of danger may therefore have some basis. Part of Crane’s excitement derives from the fact that, like Eliot, he tended to view ritual as the basis of all art, as in the now discredited theories of the Cambridge Hellenists upon which Eliot based aspects of his view of ritual. One gains some sense of Crane’s craving for ritual in a comparison he once drew between D. H. Lawrence’s novel set in Mexico, The Plumed Serpent, and Waldo Frank’s quasi-ethnographic study, Virgin Spain. Although he praises Lawrence’s novel as “a masterpiece of racial description,” he pronounces Frank’s book “a world of true reality—his ritual is not a mere invention” (230). Writing in 1926 only a few months before drafting “The Dance,” Crane’s preference for a text that manages to represent ritual as “not a mere invention” resonates with both Crane’s quest for authenticity in “The Dance,” and with his experience in Tepoztlán. Most readers would probably agree that the sacrifice of Maquokeeta is indeed an “invented” ritual, one that bears little relation to any ritual existent among Native American cultures. In spite of the mastery of the poetry, on some level Crane probably knew this as well. In Tepoztlán, at long last, Crane was able to experience that “world of true reality,” and to perceive, at first hand, the affinity between ritual and the rhythmic basis of poetic language. CODA: CRANE REDUX Twenty-five years after his leap into the Gulf of Mexico, Crane would once again cross paths with Native Americans, in part through the mediating influence of Yvor Winters. Few of Crane’s readers are aware of the thread that links his poetry to the ongoing “renaissance” in Native American literature. Since the late 1960s, the publication of an unprecedented amount of novels, poetry, and non-fiction prose written in English by Native Americans has begun to correct many longstanding preconceptions of “The Indian,” perhaps most importantly the myth of cultural extinction that, as we have seen, Crane himself helped perpetuate. Crane’s invented Indian is on one level a successor to such nineteenth-century confections as Cooper’s “Last Mohican” and Longfellow’s doomed “Hiawatha,” and as

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such it has contributed to the negative legacy that contemporary Indian writers are in the process of sweeping away. But another aspect to Crane’s representation of “The Indian” comes into focus if we reorient ourselves in light of a much more specific linkage between Crane and contemporary Native literary culture: the impact of Crane’s work upon N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa writer who has been called the “spiritual father of today’s Native American writers” (Owens 25). Momaday is best-known as the author of House Made of Dawn (1968), the novel that helped establish the climate for the Native American renaissance when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. House Made of Dawn tells the story of Abel, the “mixed blood” son of a Pueblo mother and Navajo father alienated from the traditional ways of Walatowa, the Jemez Pueblo near Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is raised. Returning to Walatowa after serving in World War II, Abel fails to overcome his cultural dislocation, commits murder, and then leads a marginal existence in Los Angeles before finally returning to the pueblo at the end of the novel. As Momaday himself puts it, the subject of House Made of Dawn is an Indian who “cannot recover his tribal identity; nor can he escape the cultural context in which he grew up” (qtd. in Maguire 454). When Momaday was starting out as a young poet in the 1950s, he was reading a lot of Crane, who, he says, was “a very important figure” (qtd. in Schubnell 190) to him while a student at the University of New Mexico. In addition to writing several early poems that allude to and bear the unmistakable cadence of Crane’s poetry, Momaday had planned to make Crane the subject of his doctoral dissertation, a project from which he was dissuaded by none other than Yvor Winters, Crane’s old ally, sometime antagonist, and, as things would turn out, Momaday’s advisor at Stanford. This quirk of fate that brought Winters, Crane, and Momaday together is not irrelevant to the story of Crane’s representation of Native Americans. Just as Winters mediated Crane’s understanding of Native culture, so too did Winters mediate Momaday’s view of Crane. Crane would have been flattered by Momaday’s attention, especially since he claimed in a letter that The Bridge represents “the Indian” in terms “which he himself would comprehend” (347). And yet, surely Crane would have also been surprised to find a Kiowa among his readers, since in the very same letter he referred to Indians as “glorious and dying animal[s]” (347). Native Americans, however, are in the process of re-defining themselves by re-writing the cultural construction of “The Indian.” Echoing the statements of many Indian writers, the critic Louis

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Owens explains that the question of identity for Native Americans is especially complex. This is because the American Indian in the world consciousness is a treasured invention, a gothic artifact evoked like the “powwows” in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” out of the dark reaches of the continent to replace the actual native, who, painfully problematic in real life, is supposed to have long vanished. (4)

Hart Crane contributed to this collection of “treasured invention[s],” but he was also deeply divided by two contradictory impulses: to represent what Owens calls “the actual Indian,” and to evoke Native Americans as the embodiment of animality, the elusive quality of the body that he sought to reclaim in his poetry.

Chapter Four

The Animal in the Machine: The Technological Sublime and Corporeal Figuration in The Bridge

These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism . . . do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every—or of almost every—fairy-tale wish. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. —Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

In the early lines of “Cape Hatteras,” Crane offers one of The Bridge’s consummate renderings of the pastoral myth of America.1 At this point in the poem, the speaker takes on the guise of an American sailor in the act of recollecting his voyages and the experience of coming home. One of the pleasures of returning “to our own / Hearths” (77) is the renewal of contact with the land itself, “our native clay.” Crane represents this nationalistic attachment to the land with a mythologizing tribute to: that deep wonderment, our native clay Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas— Those continental folded aeons, surcharged With sweetness below derricks, chimneys, tunnels— Is veined by all that time has really pledged us . . . (77)

This natural world, figured in corporeal terms, is juxtaposed with three emblematic accoutrements of technology: “derricks, chimneys, tunnels.” Situating an earthy “sweetness below” these alterations in the landscape, Crane hints at the apocalypse wrought by the machines (World War I fighter planes) that dominate the middle sections of the poem. The marks 149

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of civilization appearing in this early passage are not viewed, however, as the antithesis of the land, since there is nothing in the text to signify that these objects overwhelm that sweetness, which, it is asserted, endures. Rather than seeing nature and technology as antithetical, Crane consciously strives to represent their interpenetration, both in the excerpt quoted above and, in general, throughout “Cape Hatteras.” Indeed, the reconciliation of the nature-technology dichotomy is one of the principal objectives of the poem. In both his poems and prose, Crane adopts an ambivalent, highly nuanced attitude toward technological progress. Skeptical of the machine-cult aesthetic adopted in some quarters of the avant-garde during the 1920s—which he derides as a “program of lyrical pandering to the taste of those obsessed by the importance of machinery”—he nevertheless refrains from sounding any luddite alarms, asserting instead that the “only menace [of machinery] lies in its capacities for facile entertainment” (CPS 262). In the “native clay” passage, Crane embodies the interpenetration of nature and technology in the word “surcharged,” which signifies various forms of being loaded to excess. To speak of the land as “surcharged / With sweetness” is to evoke it as a source of abundance, the fertile mother whose name in this case is Pocahontas, the mythic representation of the nation’s “sweet” fertility to whom Crane turns repeatedly in The Bridge as an indigenous American earth goddess. To be “surcharged / With sweetness” is to be over-ripe, bearing a surfeit of natural bounty. Yet “surcharged” also draws on the language of science, in particular the language of atomic physics, which was well-represented in public discourse during the 1920s because of the popularization of such revolutionary developments as Einstein’s theory of relativity.2 The precise extent of Crane’s familiarity with the new physics remains uncertain, but at the very least he would have encountered these ideas in Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and The Modern World (1925), which he read in 1926.3 According to the OED, the word “charge” was used as early as the late eighteenth century to designate the buildup of electricity in such devices as Leyden Jars and batteries. By the 1910s, however, it was being used primarily to describe the electrical properties of atomic particles, in particular the negative and positive “charge” of, respectively, electrons and protons. Taken in isolation, it would be somewhat suspect to argue that Crane is alluding to the scientific meaning of “charge” in this passage. Yet “Cape Hatteras” is a poem about revolutionary technological progress, one that explicitly invokes the haunting spectre of a mechanistic universe in which “Man” “see[s] himself an atom in a shroud” (78). The diction of the poem is, moreover, frequently drawn from the lexicons of chemistry and industrial science (“Ammoniac proverbs,” “bicarbonated eyes,”

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“foaming anthracite,” “combustion,” “naphtha,” “change of energy,” “dynamos”), geometry (“Helix,” “circle,” “cylinder,” “circumferences,” “diametric”), mathematics (“theorems,” “ciphers,” “infinity”), and physics (“gravitation’s / vortex”). Given this context, it is difficult to avoid concluding that Crane’s figuration of nature’s bounty as a body “surcharged / With sweetness” blends pastoral and scientific terminologies so as to represent the interpenetration of these two realms. Indeed, Crane breaks the line in question so as to draw particular attention to the word “surcharged,” which occupies the terminal position of an enjambed line, leaving the reader momentarily suspended and therefore wondering, surcharged with what? The land itself, in this trope, is infused to excess with a figurative electricity, a potency that parallels that of the airplanes and power plants that Crane also depicts as “surcharged” with explosive energies. Thus a squadron of World War I fighter planes are depicted as a collection of “hurtling javelin[s] of winged ordnance” that “bristle the heights above a screeching gale,” while “with razor sheen they zoom each rapid helix!” (80). The machines in “Cape Hatteras” are pervaded by violent but exhilarating power, and they are matched by a natural world also infused with energy, not only in the “native clay” passage, but also in the latter part of the poem that focuses on Whitman. Blooming flowers, for instance, are figured as “tethered foam / Around bared teeth of stallions,” “loam” is “rife,” and the speaker of the poem listens as thunder’s eloquence through green arcades Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft—’til Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill! (83)

These technological and pastoral tropes for power are themselves tropes for the rhetorical power Crane asserts in often excessive, extravagant verse. “Power’s script” (79), he calls it, in his extended rendering of a power plant. This parallel between the technologies of writing and machinery is perhaps most striking in the passage in which the “Falcon-Ace” fighter pilot is commanded to “remember” that: Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge To conjugate infinity’s dim marge— Anew . . ! (83)

Technological and poetic power are channeled through the body: the wrists of pilot and writer that wield plane and pen. The wrist, of course, carries the

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body’s pulse, a “charge” signifying not just the spark of energy which also suffuses “our native clay,” but a responsibility, the precise meaning of which remains cloaked in an ancient tongue, the esoteric and sacred language of Sanskrit. The duty “to conjugate infinity” represents the will to transcend spatial and temporal limitations via the technological sublime, but it also signifies the pursuit of poetic originality through the manipulation of language. THE ANIMAL IN THE MACHINE Proceeding through a series of fantastic bodies—human, animal, and mechanical—“Cape Hatteras” explores the dialectic between nature and technology by taking measure of their effects upon the human sensorium. Accordingly, much of the poem is preoccupied with visual and auditory activities, events in which the body’s perceptual capacities are stimulated, assaulted, and extended by new technologies. “Hearing’s leash is strummed” (79), for instance, by the new electrified power plants of the era, and a pilot’s eyes are “bicarbonated white” (80) by the unprecedented speed of the airplane. Yet “Cape Hatteras” is not ordinarily thought of as a poem that dwells upon physicality. It has scarcely been recognized, for instance, that the poem opens with the body writ large—very large. The body in question, however, is not human but dinosaur: Imponderable the dinosaur sinks slow, the mammoth saurian ghoul, the eastern Cape . . . While rises in the west the coastwise range, slowly the hushed land—(77)

Even more corporeal in an earlier draft as a “mammoth corpse,” the extinct beast guarding entry to this episode of The Bridge is in fact only the first of numerous animals populating the section, all of them in some sense “imponderable,” all of them tropes for the intoxicating power of the new technologies of the twentieth century that are showcased in “Cape Hatteras.”4 The dinosaur in these early lines also figures the topography of the cape as it “sinks slow,” while the mountains to the west undergo a corresponding rise, both movements as seen from within the cockpit of a banking airplane, as the visual effect of these cascading lines themselves suggest.

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Although the dinosaur itself never resurfaces, it is joined by a host of oversized, fabulous, or otherwise anomalous creatures, including a dragon and its “covey”; a flying whale (in the form of a “Cetus-like” dirigible); griffons; frogs and other unspecified amphibians; stallions; “moonferrets”; larvae; a conch; and a variety of birds, including eagles, falcons, ravens, condors, and the inevitable albatross, not to mention the numerous wings, feathers, gizzards, “downy offings,” and other avian body-parts belonging to no particular species. In addition to representing technological potency, most of these animals suggest various forms of earliness, either the prehistoric realm of such “primitive” species as saurians, amphibians, and birds; the mythological world of such imaginary beasts of fable as dragons, griffons, and their less familiar counterparts, “moonferrets” and a flying whale, fabulous creatures of Crane’s own invention; or, finally, the incompletely developed larval stage of certain insects and amphibians. Inviting the reader to watch fighter planes “emerge from larval-silver hangars” (80), Crane suggests that the airplanes, power plants, skyscrapers, radios, and other technological marvels featured in the poem are the larval forms of a new era being born, ushering in what the poem calls “New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed / Of dynamos” (79). Writing in the early 1920s, Gorham Munson (Crane’s close friend during these years) anticipates this feature of “Cape Hatteras,” declaring that “We are in the childhood of a new age” (25), and coining the term “skyscraper primitives” to describe the avant-garde.5 In his poem, Crane’s skyscrapers are designated as a new “breed of towers” (78), new animal-machine hybrids that are simultaneously futuristic and prehistoric, thereby lending this unfamiliar modernity of large and powerful machines the authority of the archaic and mythic past. Most critical readings of “Cape Hatteras” have overlooked this proliferation of theriomorphic tropes and their connection with the poem’s corporeal emphasis. Taking their cue from Crane himself, critics view the text primarily as what Crane in a letter to Otto Kahn called “a kind of ode to Whitman” (348). These readings have illuminated how the poem revisits Whitman’s conviction that the technological “conquest of time and space,” so widely trumpeted during the nineteenth century, was the sign of a more profound evolution in human civilization toward an idealized state of democratic unity. Crane signals his engagement with Whitman from the outset by taking the epigraph for “Cape Hatteras” from the part of “Passage to India” in which Whitman envisions the successful completion of these voyages: “The seas all crossed, / weathered the capes, the voyage done . . . ” (75). Declaring in “Passage to India” that the founding of the

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American republic is a sign of this “purpose vast” (533), Whitman sets out his vision of an earth spanned by technology: Passage to India! Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. (532)

Questioning whether Whitman’s utopianism remains viable in the twentieth century, especially in light of how technological progress exacerbated the brutality of the First World War, “Cape Hatteras” is also the poem in which Crane stakes his claim as Whitman’s poetic heir. It is important to keep in mind, however, that Whitman’s “passage to India,” the physical exploration of the earth, is but the type of the mental and spiritual journeying he describes as Passage to more than India! Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights? O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those? Disportest thou on waters such as those? Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas? Then have thy bent unleash’d.

Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas! Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems! You, strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you. (539)

Crane’s speeding airplanes are tropes for Whitman’s potentially apocalyptic “flights” and his soundings “below the Sanscrit and the Vedas,” to which Crane directly alludes when he accepts the “Sanskrit charge / To conjugate infinity’s dim marge” (81). Crane’s relationship to Whitman is one of the central questions to address in any reading of “Cape Hatteras.” But an account of the poem remains incomplete unless the assessment of Whitman’s role is conjoined with an examination of how Crane’s representations of technological power are mediated by corporeal figurations, especially because Whitman himself is

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figured in bodily terms. Whitman is apostrophized three times in the poem as Panis Angelicus, a eucharistic epithet that can be translated as “angelic bread” or “bread of angels.” Whitman is here represented as the body of which the speaker of the poem (the would-be Whitmanic poet) and, by implication, its readers, must eat in order to renew what the poem calls Whitman’s “syllables of faith” (78). The bestiary in “Cape Hatteras” that signals this corporeal emphasis is by no means the first instance in which Crane writes about the body in the guise of a theriomorphic language. Crane’s poetry from the mid1920s often features animals as tropes for human eroticism. As detailed in Chapter One, these lyrics echo Physique de l’amour, Remy de Gourmont’s notorious foray into sexology that Crane enthused over in 1922. Based upon the conviction that “Man is an animal, submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality” (4), Gourmont’s work meshed perfectly with the culture of 1920s New York, which was marked by a craze for “going public with one’s animal nature” (A. Douglas 48). Crane’s fascination with the animality of human eroticism is evident, for instance, in such poems as “Recitative”—which represents lust as an “ape’s face” (25)—and is especially prominent in “The Wine Menagerie,” which is organized around the conceit that people drinking in a bar are like animals caged in a menagerie. Although the animals in “Cape Hatteras” are tropes for machines, and not for eroticism as such, they indicate that Crane’s representation of technology is informed by the same fascination with animality that marks his erotic poems. Like the erotic leopards and serpents of “The Wine Menagerie,” the creatures of “Cape Hatteras” are tropes for the sublime, either because they overwhelm by virtue of their immensity or aggressiveness, or because they defy comprehension because they are hybrid or anomalous beings, or because they combine all these qualities. The reader is asked, for instance, to envision World War I fighter planes taking off from naval vessels as the awe-inspiring flights of griffons, those fabled creatures brandishing the head and wings of an eagle fastened upon a lion’s body: Low, shadowed of the Cape, Regard the moving turrets! From grey decks See scouting griffons rise through gaseous crepe Hung low . . . (80)

Rising through “gaseous crepe” that itself alludes to sublimation as a process of vaporization, the griffons suggest the sublime through the combined

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qualities of their legendary ferocity (mirroring the aggression of human warfare), their hybrid form, and their exotic other-worldly aura. The dinosaur is the first intimation of the “imponderable” technological marvels to follow, such as the “gigantic power house” (78), the machine most directly prefigured by this “mammoth saurian.” Since Longinus, definitions of the sublime have gone through numerous permutations, in part depending upon the class of object—natural, textual, technological—conceived as the source of sublime experience.6 Extending Kant’s definition of the natural sublime, Thomas Weiskel terms an object sublime “if the attempt to represent it determines the mind to regard its inability to grasp wholly the object as a symbol of the mind’s relation to a transcendent order” (23). The imponderable, of course, is that which cannot be thought about, something that defies comprehension, and may thus be considered sublime in Weiskel’s sense of something the mind fails “to grasp wholly.” In its root sense as that which cannot be weighed, however, “imponderable” is a term from pre-twentieth-century physics designating such phenomena as ether, light, or heat, all of which were deemed weightless, hence immeasurable. From its very first word, then, “Cape Hatteras” deploys a scientific idiom in its representation of nature so as to simulate the blending of technology and nature. Like these putatively weightless phenomena, dinosaurs are seemingly immeasurable, but they elude measurement not because they are weightless, but because they are off the scale in the opposing direction of largeness. The dinosaur receding from view as it slowly plods its way across these opening, broken lines is an imponderable enigma, both because of its immense size and because its extinction poses one of the most famous conundrums of evolution, hence one of the imponderabilia of natural history. Identifying the dinosaur with the zoological term “saurian,” and echoing this classificatory gesture later in the poem when seaplanes are labeled “amphibian,” Crane draws attention to the poem’s underlying concern with evolution. The fantastic animal-machines of “Cape Hatteras” offer a mixed message. On the one hand, they signal a new phase in human evolution because they radically extend the ability to overcome barriers of time and space. Yet their potential for bringing the instinct for aggression to new levels of destruction raises the prospect of species extinction, a fate not unlike the apocalyptic demise of the dinosaur. This evolutionary subtext points toward one of the defining characteristics of the technological sublime. Whereas other forms of the sublime entail a powerful sense of human limitations, the technological sublime undercuts the idea of limits because it presupposes the idea of progress, the ability of civilization to generate an unending series of mechanical innovations. The

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central paradox of the Kantian, or “negative,” sublime is that greatness is only revealed when one is confronted with its unattainability. “There can be no sublime moment,” writes Weiskel, “without the implicit, dialectical endorsement of human limitations” (44). Weiskel illustrates how the sublime entails this dialectic of the bounded and the limitless in an elegant reading of Wordsworth’s encounter with the blind beggar in The Prelude. Staring at the man’s “sightless eyes,” Wordsworth views him as “an apt type . . . of the utmost we can know” (261). As Weiskel explains, the impairment of the senses triggers an “epiphany of absolute limitation” which, in turn, precipitates the sublime moment when “the other, unknown world comes into being” (44). Given this precedent for linking blindness and the sublime, it is hardly surprising that in “Cape Hatteras” Crane turns repeatedly to blindness as a paradoxical sign of the sublime. Yet Crane inflects this exemplary Romantic trope with a decidedly modernist conflation of the mechanical and the corporeal. Rather than being a trope for human limitations, the “blind ecstasy” of Crane’s dynamo points toward the recovery of the instinctual, corporeal powers signaled by the poem’s hybrid animal-machines. Locating sublimity within technological objects radically alters the psychological model of sublime experience. In the natural sublime, the individual feels insignificant in the presence of apparent infinity, but then rebounds with a sense of superiority because “the mind is able to conceive something larger and more powerful than the senses can grasp” (Nye 7). In the technological sublime, however, the sublime object is itself a manifestation of reason. Because displays of mechanical power are associated with civilization rather than nature, the dialogue of observer and sublime object occurs between an individual and something produced through human ingenuity, not between an individual and nature. The awesome aspect of such technological objects as bridges, dams, and airplanes thus celebrates the power of human reason, as incarnated in the admired accomplishments of engineers and inventors. Moreover, the history of technology offers numerous instances of machines that inspire awe in one generation only to be taken for granted in the next, thereby ensuring that each successive generation will demand fresh technological breakthroughs. Summing up the effects of this dynamic, David Nye argues that “the technological sublime proposes the idea of reason in constant evolution” (60). This inextricable link between the supposition of evolutionary development and the technological sublime is epitomized, for Nye, in a segment of the narrative accompanying the immensely popular “Futurama” ride at the General Motors exhibit for the 1939 New York’s World Fair: “The world, far from being finished, is hardly yet begun” (qtd. in Nye 218).

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Crane’s evocation of what in the 1920s was widely called “The Machine Age” predates this sentiment by a decade. Yet for all the doubt his poem casts on the benefits of technological advancement—especially as embodied in an airplane’s spectacular crash “into mashed and shapeless debris” (81)—“Cape Hatteras” is imbued with the sense of a glorious future still to come. So the speaker declares, addressing both Whitman and the reader, “Not this our empire yet” (78). The section closes, moreover, with “Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace” (83), an image of the angelic machines of the future. In the larger scheme of The Bridge, it is the Brooklyn Bridge itself, of course, that embodies this “seraphic grace” of technology. The bridge is joined by a catalogue of technological devices, including elevators, cinemas, traffic lights, sailing ships, skyscrapers, trains, subways, and electric signs—many of them, like the bridge, connected with the mechanics of travel. But there is a sense in which all these objects are avatars of the bridge itself, as Crane suggests in a 1926 letter: “The bridge in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp . . . seems to really have a career” (227). This grandiose structure presiding over the entire poem also appears at various junctures in the guise of a covenantal rainbow, including “the rainbow’s arch” that “shimmeringly stands / Above the Cape’s ghoul-mound” (84) in the climactic final lines of “Cape Hatteras.” Lee Edelman views all these bridges as tropes for the idea of covenant, arguing that the disjunctive violence of Crane’s rhetoric amounts to a “covenantal poetics” (243). Just as covenant, in a religious sense, entails violent acts of sacrifice to effect its binding, so Crane’s poetic covenant “recognizes both violence and reconstructive renewal” (187). This conjunction of violence and transcendence is particularly prominent in “Atlantis,” the final ecstatic dithyramb of The Bridge. Here the reader is brought “up the index of night,” face to face with the bridge’s “granite and steel” (105), to confront the technological sublime, which makes “eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel” (106). The architecture of the bridge supplies Crane with the tropes out of which he builds his own “blinding” machine of textual sublimity, in which, “through spiring cordage . . . Deity’s young name . . . ascends” (107). “Atlantis” constitutes The Bridge’s most sustained engagement with the Brooklyn Bridge itself as a quintessential exemplar of the technological sublime. Even so, the conjunction of subject matter and rhetoric deployed in “Cape Hatteras” represents Crane’s most extreme participation in the avant-garde strain of modernism in which experimentation in the arts, technological innovation, and the idea of progress became inextricable. In Andreas Huyssen’s view, “technology played a crucial, if not the crucial, role

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in the avant-garde’s attempt to overcome the art/life dichotomy and make art productive in the transformation of everyday life” (After 9). Huyssen traces this avant-garde tradition to Henri de Saint Simon’s “messianic scheme” in which art, science, and industry were to usher in a new world (4–5). Whitman’s utopian view of technological progress is in some sense an American version of Saint Simon’s. Although “Cape Hatteras” tries on and updates this nineteenth-century romance with technology, it by no means asserts that the new technologies of the 1920s represent the fulfillment of a messianic prophecy. Crane’s doubts about technology are far more prominent in “Cape Hatteras” than in “Atlantis,” and this tension between skepticism and affirmation makes “Cape Hatteras” a more relevant text by which to gauge the complexities of Crane’s attitude toward technology. As Alan Trachtenberg asserts, “Cape Hatteras” “poses the key question” of The Bridge: “What are the grounds for hope that modern history will not destroy itself?” (Brooklyn 151). The terms of Trachtenberg’s question require some adjustment, however, in order to recognize that “Cape Hatteras” addresses itself to the cultural crisis of modernity by figuring that crisis in corporeal terms. As Tim Armstrong argues, because of radical changes in the perception of the body in medical, psychological, and social theory, “modernity brings both a fragmentation and augmentation of the body in relation to technology” (3).7 The figures of the body in “Cape Hatteras” are marked by precisely this balance between violent disintegration and fantasies of perfection. THE CENTER OF THE BRIDGE “Cape Hatteras” is in many respects the crucial pivot upon which turns the entirety of The Bridge, and yet critical judgment of both its literary merit and substantive meaning has always been seriously divided. Some of Crane’s critics—Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, most notoriously—view “Cape Hatteras” as one of the weakest parts of The Bridge, judging its rhetorical extravagance (and Crane’s hand-clasp with Whitman at the end of the poem) an unpardonable breach of poetic decorum.8 Even among sympathetic readers, some of whom view it as a celebration and others as a condemnation of the “Machine Age,” “Cape Hatteras” is routinely denigrated as “the most troubled” (Yingling 209) or “least successful” (Paul 232) section of The Bridge. Yet it has also garnered superlative praise, such as Albert Gelpi’s opinion that it represents “the most extreme and successful attempt at Futurist poetry in America” (413), and R. W. B. Lewis’s description of it as a “masterpiece” consisting of “poetic rant of a supreme and traditional kind, the fierce and

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joyous rant of a poet who . . . is exercising to the utmost his talent for sonorous declamation and his love of it” (323–4). Critical doubts about the section have been fed, in part, by its troubled composition history. Blocked on the poem between 1927 and 1929, Crane called it in a letter “an irritating collection of notes and phrases defying any semblance of synthesis” (359). Against his better judgment, in the spring of 1929 he even agreed with Caresse Crosby’s suggestion that the Black Sun Press bring out a Paris edition of The Bridge by the end of 1929, whether or not he was able to finish “Cape Hatteras” and the other two sections (“Quaker Hill” and “Indiana”) with which he was struggling. In the end, however, he deferred publication, telling the Crosbys, “I am anxious to add more—the ‘Cape Hatteras’ sections, at least—before you bring it out” (415). Pleading for more time, in another letter he explains that the Paris edition of The Bridge “wouldn’t be complete or even representative without” (416) the final version of “Cape Hatteras.” In the process of deciding where to place the three photographs made by Walker Evans that accompany the text of the Paris edition, Crane indicated just how central a position “Cape Hatteras” occupies in the poem as a whole. “The middle photograph (the one of the barges and tug),” he instructs Caresse Crosby, “goes between the ‘Cutty Sark’ Section and the ‘Hatteras’ Section. That is the ‘center’ of the book, both physically and symbolically” (421).9 Although the origins of “Cape Hatteras” are almost as well-documented as its difficult completion, they are much less well-known and rarely touched on in the secondary literature.10 Several months before his burst of writing on The Bridge during the summer of 1926, Crane provided Otto Kahn, his financial patron, with a rough plan of the entire poem, including the following description of what would eventually become “Cape Hatteras,” although it had not yet acquired its name: III. Whitman-The Spiritual body of America (A dialogue between Whitman and a dying soldier in a Washington hospital; the infraction of physical death, disunity, on the concept of immortality) (236)

Although the melodramatic narrative would disappear from the final text, and the technological subject-matter is not yet projected, the “dialogue” with Whitman would remain central to the poem. The first mention of “Cape Hatteras” by name occurs in another letter to Kahn written in the fall of 1927, in which Crane describes it as still “unfinished” (348). “Cape Hatteras” was begun, then, sometime between the spring of 1926 and the fall of 1927, which places its inception during what is arguably the height of the

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cult of the machine. The New York “Machine Age Exposition,” for instance, mounted in 1927 by The Little Review magazine and a board of artists that included Marcel Duchamp, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth, has been called the “apotheosis” of the “exaltation of the machine and industry” (Haskell, American 156). One of the central elements of this exaltation was “netting the sky,” as Ann Douglas puts it, “finding in the air what seemed an androgynous free-for-all of spiritual energy” (434). On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris to complete the first successful solo flight across the Atlantic, unleashing a frenzy of international enthusiasm for aviation and marking a high point in what was known in the 1920s as “air-mindedness.”11 Writing to his father one month after Lindbergh’s feat, Crane reflects on the worldwide sensation it provoked. Although Crane did not ordinarily discuss literary matters in correspondence with his father, this letter displays the mixture of skepticism and enthusiasm that characterizes Crane’s representation of technological progress in “Cape Hatteras”: For over a month we haven’t heard, read, eaten or been permitted to dream anything but airplanes and Lindbergh. After reading a good deal about it I’ve decided that the world is quite mad. I’m sure it will take months for people to get their eyes out of the sky and their necks uncrooked and back to their stomachs. Time and Space is the myth of the modern world, however, and it’s interesting to see how any victory in that field is heralded by the mass of humanity. In a way my Bridge is a manifestation of the same general subject. Maybe I’m just a little jealous of Lindy! (HCF 558–59)

Although he begins by playing the skeptic, Crane is clearly fascinated by the translation of Lindbergh’s flight into an icon of mass culture. His assertion that “Time and Space is the myth of the modern world” is one he would reiterate in a number of letters during this period, as when he tells Yvor Winters that “the annihilation of time and space” is “the prime myth of the modern world” (288). In the same letter he calls “science, travel, (in the name of speed)—psychoanalysis, etc” (287) the new mythic forces of the twentieth century, but by calling them mythic he was not by any means denigrating them. As he explains in a 1926 letter to Gorham Munson, “It is not my interest to discredit science,” which “has been as inspired as poetry,—and if you could but recognize it, much more hypothetically motivated” (233). Consisting of well over two hundred long lines, frequently extending into hexameters and fourteeners, and grouped into weighty verse paragraphs

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of up to twenty lines, “Cape Hatteras” is the longest section of The Bridge, exceeding “The River” (the next longest) by nearly one hundred lines. There is much enjambment within each of the sixteen stanzas, but only once across stanzaic boundaries. In addition, nearly all of the stanzas are emphatically end-stopped with an exclamation point. Overall, the poem therefore consists of a sequence of lengthy, highly-charged units, each of which moves at high speed, and which fit together like the cogs of a precisely ordered, mechanized structure. Thematically, the poem is essentially contrapuntal, beginning with a long segment about technology that takes up approximately two-thirds of the poem, and ending with a shorter homage to Whitman and his utopian vision of a democratic world united by technology. Crane also pays tribute to Whitman’s affirmation of homosexual desire in the coded reference to Whitman’s “pact, new bound / Of living brotherhood!” (82). Twice invoking the phrase, “Recorders ages hence,” Crane alludes to Whitman’s projection of himself into the future in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which Whitman declares that readers “A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence” (308) will “cross” the figurative waters of experience with him. But there is also a gay subtext to Crane’s allusion to “Recorders Ages Hence,” which is the title of the “Calamus” poem in which Whitman instructs his future readers to remember him as “the tenderest lover,” “Whose happiest days were far away through fields . . . he and another walking hand in hand, they twain apart from other men” (276). One of the difficulties posed by the poem is precisely this splicing together of what is essentially a pastoral elegy for Whitman, in which Crane conjoins the assertion of his literary maturity with the symbolic burial of an ancestor, and an apocalyptic yet in some sense celebratory representation of technological marvels. He has thus a dual purpose in “Cape Hatteras”: to claim Whitman’s mantle, but also to “acclimatize” or “absorb the machine” (CPS 261–2), as he puts it in his 1930 essay, “Modern Poetry.” The other characteristic that renders “Cape Hatteras” a “difficult” modernist text is that it lacks a clearly defined dramatic setting. The ostensible scene of the poem is, of course, Cape Hatteras, where in 1903 the Wright brothers made aviation history at Kitty Hawk. One of the islands off the coast of North Carolina comprising the Outer Banks, Cape Hatteras also juts into that area of the ocean known as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” the site of countless shipwrecks going back several centuries. Geographical symbol of both technological triumph and disaster, Cape Hatteras thus serves Crane as an apt point of departure from which to explore the mixed blessings of technological progress. Yet if Cape Hatteras is the nominal setting of the poem, its landscape is primarily symbolic rather than naturalistic, and Crane violates spatial

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and temporal boundaries in order to blend a range of locations. Thus the wreckage of a World War I fighter plane shot down over Europe ends up “By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!” (81). The poem progresses through a series of capes, all of them boundary regions that represent human restlessness, the “infinity-seeking” (239) spirit of what Oswald Spengler termed the “Faustian” culture of Europe in Decline of the West, the work which “bowled over” (316) Crane when he read it during the summer of 1926 and called it “one of the most magnificent and formidable books” he had ever read (277). Far from being restricted to any particular spatial arena, the poem is organized instead around the subjective voice delivering a monologue that places the reader into one imaginary situation after another. In the first part of the poem, we listen to the voice of a sailor returning home to the United States, recollecting his voyage to the “Old World,” a composite of the “strange tongues,” “ancient names,” and “grey citadels” of such places as Marseilles and Bombay: But we, who round the capes, the promontories Where strange tongues vary messages of surf Below grey citadels, repeating to the stars The ancient names—return home to our own Hearths (77)

This speaker proceeds to ponder the bond he feels with the American soil, meditating upon the pastoral myth of America, personified as the “red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas.” But if this relatively straightforward pattern of nostos marks the beginning of the poem, it is quickly blurred by a succession of imaginary tableaux evoked by the voice of this Faustian voyager. This voice abruptly shifts its attention to meditate upon the effort to overcome the limits imposed by time and space. As the poem proceeds, the voice describes the industrial spectacle of a power house, the Wright brothers’s flight at Kitty Hawk, World War I airplane battles, and, finally, the crash of an airplane shot down during the war, which brings the first part of the poem to a definitive endpoint that Crane marks with asterisks. In the second part of the poem, the subjective voice becomes virtually indistinguishable from Crane himself, as he elegizes Whitman, treating him as the incarnation of Spengler’s Faustian quester, who voyages “beyond” all boundaries—“Glacial sierras,” “the flight of ravens,” and “Hermetically past condor zones” (82). It is only in this latter part of the poem, in its final four stanzas, that Crane turns to the first person singular, the “I” emerging

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as Crane depicts the encounter with Whitman as an instance of the textual sublime: Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping! O, early following thee, I searched the hill Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, ’til With June the mountain laurel broke through green And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen! Potomac lilies,—then the Pontiac rose, And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows! White banks of moonlight came descending valleys— How speechful on oak-vizored palisades, As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys Heard thunder’s eloquence through green arcades Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft—’til Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill! (82–3)

As Celeste Schenck has observed, Crane alludes to Milton’s “Lycidas” by beginning the conventional flower catalogue of the pastoral elegy with cowslip, but then Americanizes the form, first by alluding to Whitman’s lilacs with a variety of purple flowers, then by adding his own garland of American flora and “green arcades.”12 The succession of three “I’s” that appears in this stanza is conspicuous in a long poem that until now has restricted itself to “we” and “our” to identify the speaker. Crane progresses from “I read,” to “I searched,” to “I following,” all of which suggest a subordinate relationship to Whitman’s example. This series of “I’s” concludes in the next stanza with the triumphant declaration of poetic maturity: “I sing” (83). The Cape’s history as a site of death frames the entire poem, with death alluded to three times with the word “ghoul”—once in the opening stanza, once in the final stanza, and once in the twelfth stanza, shortly after the start of the Whitman section. “Ghoul” first appears as a trope for the Cape in one of the three phrases in apposition to one another in the opening lines examined above: “dinosaur,” “mammoth saurian / ghoul,” “eastern / Cape” (77). In the final lines of the poem, a rainbow “shimmeringly stands / Above the Cape’s ghoulmound” (84), marking the renewal of Whitman’s covenant, his “pact, new bound / Of living brotherhood!” (82). But it is the instance midway through the poem that provides the clue as to why Crane chose to associate the negativity

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of technological progress with ghoulishness. Alluding to Whitman’s Civil War experiences of offering succor to wounded soldiers (and to the parts of Specimen Days in which these experiences are recounted), Crane pictures Whitman at his vigils, bloody, by that Cape,— Ghoul-mound of man’s perversity at balk And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk Hast kept of wounds, O Mourner, all that sum That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme! (82)

Crane’s emphatically corporeal trope for the “perversity” of human warfare is a ghoul, the legendary creature that robs graves and feasts on corpses. As the binder of national wounds, Whitman represents, of course, the opposite of such ghoulishness. Crane underlines this opposition by balancing the cannibalism of ghouls against the eucharistic epithet for Whitman, Panis Angelicus. Here two figurative acts of consuming the body are held in tension with one another. In one, the body feeds life; in the other, death. Whitman’s role as the healer of wounds has been carried over into “Cape Hatteras” from a synopsis Crane wrote (probably in 1927) for the as yet unwritten section.13 In these notes, Crane describes a poem in which the human body takes central stage. Conceived as a “dialogue” in a Washington hospital between Whitman and “a dying (southern) soldier,” the plan calls for a radically different dramatic setting from the one Crane ultimately employed. It is nevertheless consistent with the final text’s depiction of Whitman as a healer, even though Crane’s originally planned narrative completely disappears from the published poem. In the synopsis, the soldier on his deathbed speaks with Whitman and then “asks Whitman to call a priest, for absolution.” As Crane spells out in his notes, Whitman leaves the scene—deliriously the soldier calls him back. The part ends here, before Whitman’s return, of course. The irony is, of course, in the complete absolution which Whitman’s words have already given the dying man, before the priest is called for. This, alternated with the eloquence of the dying man, is the substance of the dialogue—the emphasis being on the symbolism of the soldier’s body having been used as a forge toward a state of Unity.14

This melodramatic scene of Whitman caring for a dying soldier, which resembles scenes from Whitman’s Specimen Days and is reminiscent of

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nineteenth-century sentimental literature, gives way to a decidedly modernist text that in its final shape is aggressively non-narrative, devoid of any overarching mise-en-scène. On the other hand, the sacramental role Whitman plays here is preserved in “Cape Hatteras” through a variety of means, most obviously by referring to him as Panis Angelicus. Less immediately obvious is the way Crane’s focus in the synopsis on the corporeality of the soldier is also carried over into the final version of the poem. In the earlier outline for The Bridge touched on above, Crane envisions a section about “Whitman-The Spiritual body of America” (236), and this formulation survives in the idea of employing the soldier’s body as a symbolic “forge toward a state of Unity.” Not only does Crane identify the notion of a “forge” as the “emphasis” of the poem; he indicates that this trope is of cardinal importance by entitling the synopsis: “Cape Hatteras section—(the forge).” To conceive of the body as a forge is to think of it as an apparatus that channels fire, a tool that makes fabrication possible through the application of heat. In what amounts to the suppressed ur-narrative of “Cape Hatteras,” Crane suggests a kind of alchemical forge in which the dying body is the workshop through which the self is transformed. Although the trope of the body as forge never explicitly appears in the final text of “Cape Hatteras,” it is analogous to the poem’s anthropomorphic, theriomorphic, and mechanomorphic tropes, all of which point toward an interpenetration of the body and technology. It is even possible to detect echoes of the forge itself in the final text, where it shows up in various images of combustion, such as the representation of the sun as a kind of solar forge in the phrase, “Combustion at the astral core” (77); the depiction of a warplane as it crashes to the ground “trapped in combustion gyr- / Ing” (81); the image of “The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches” (79); and the representation of “infinity” as a “blind crucible of endless space” (77). Like a forge, a crucible is a device that facilitates the production of objects through the application of heat. One of the more striking variations on the forge-body trope occurs in a depiction of World War I air battles in which several corporeal tropes intermingle: a conch of thunder answers Cloud-belfries, banging, while searchlights, like fencers, Slit the sky’s pancreas of foaming anthracite Toward thee, O Corsair of the typhoon,—pilot, hear! (80)

Here technology executes a surgical thrust into the sky’s metaphorical body, the penetration of which is a trope for the violence intended for the pilot. The bodily interior of this anthropomorphic sky—itself a figuration of the

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pilot’s body—is suffused with the roiling fuel of “foaming anthracite.” In this complex conjunction of tropes, Crane enlarges the human body to the proportions of the sky and describes it as a kind of forge, a coal furnace agitated from within and without by violent forces. THE POWER HOUSE OF LANGUAGE The most important instance in which the forge resurfaces in the final text of “Cape Hatteras” is Crane’s extended rendering of a power plant fueled by electricity, the fire of the twentieth century. The electrified power stations that proliferated during the 1910s were of unprecedented scale, far exceeding the power and physical size of the steam-driven factories and water mills that preceded them. One of the most famous of these was the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant outside of Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn and built over several years during the mid-1920s. The largest factory in the world at the time, it quickly became an icon of modernity; like many other power stations, it also became a popular tourist site.15 In 1927, during the same period in which Crane began work on “Cape Hatteras,” Charles Sheeler photographed the plant as part of a Ford advertising campaign. This experience represented a turning point in Sheeler’s career, helping to convince him that the modern factory was “our substitute for religious expression” (qtd. in Haskell, American 153). His photos and such paintings as River Rouge Plant (1932) were widely admired as embodiments of the American technological sublime, and they inspired many other works in the visual arts, including Charles Demuth’s important late painting, My Egypt (1927), which equates a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with Egyptian pyramids.16 The River Rouge Plant is certainly not the sole source for Crane’s “gigantic power house.” For one thing, during 1920 Crane worked for six months in his father’s Cleveland candy factory (which shows up in “The River” section of The Bridge as “my father’s cannery works” (58)), and he also worked briefly in a munitions factory during 1918.17 River Rouge and the attention it garnered nevertheless inform Crane’s poem in intriguing ways. In contrast to the quietude and harmony suffusing Sheeler’s River Rouge Plant, Crane’s text is replete with images of speed, violence, and deafening noise, and thus emphasizes the dynamism of technology. In some respects “Cape Hatteras” is therefore closer in spirit to the slightly earlier artwork of Max Weber, John Marin, and especially Joseph Stella, all of whom celebrated the vitality and accelerated pace of life in the new urban world of New York City during the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, Crane originally wished to use one of Stella’s paintings of Brooklyn Bridge as the frontispiece for The Bridge. There

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are nevertheless certain affinities between Crane’s poem, Sheeler’s work, and the “Precisionist” emphasis on mathematical harmony and order. The reasons behind Crane’s decision to use Evans’s photos rather than Stella’s painting remain unclear (they were influenced in part by technical questions of reproduction), but the effect on The Bridge was to nudge it somewhat closer to the Precisionist aesthetic, an affinity which is also evident in Crane’s depiction of the “coiled precision” (80) of the dynamo’s ball-bearings. The power house appears fairly early in “Cape Hatteras,” occupying the entire fifth stanza.18 Following the voyager’s musings upon returning home, Crane’s speaker turns to Whitman to ask whether “infinity” is “still the same” as when he contemplated death along the shore of “Paumanok” (Long Island) in such elegies as “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” to which the text alludes. The fourth stanza ends with Whitman’s “visionary” status embodied in the image of his eyes as “Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!” (78). In one of the more abrupt segues between stanzas, Crane then turns to the power house, which first makes itself known by its sound: The nasal whine of power whips a new universe . . . Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky, Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs, New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed Of dynamos, where hearing’s leash is strummed . . . Power’s script,—wound, bobbin-bound, refined— Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars. Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder parts Our hearing momentwise; but fast in whirling armatures, As bright as frogs’ eyes, giggling in the girth Of steely gizzards—axle-bound, confined In coiled precision, bunched in mutual glee The bearings glint,—O murmurless and shined In oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy! (78–9)

Focusing on the impact of technology on the human senses, these lines take the reader through several progressions. There is, first of all, a movement from abundant and cacophonous noise to silence. Beginning with the strange animal-like sound of a “nasal whine,” then dwelling on the tremendous loudness of “booming spools,” the “slap of belts,” and the “crash of split thunder,”

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the stanza comes to its striking close in “murmurless” silence. There is also a progressive narrowing of focus from outside to inside. Crane begins with an exterior view of the factory seen against the stars of an evening sky, turns to the machines within the building, and climaxes by zooming in for a close up of ball-bearings. The stanza ends, then, with the inner workings of the machines themselves, which are figured in theriomorphic terms as “steely gizzards.” Once this interior view has been reached, audition recedes and the poem goes completely visual until, in a final twist, Crane invokes a figurative blindness, the “blind ecstasy” of the ball-bearings that signal the experience of the sublime. A similar progression from overwhelming noise to paradoxical silence marks the British writer Arnold Bennett’s description of one of the new power stations he visited in New York City. In Those United States (1912), Bennett writes that the “enormous white hall” was sparsely populated by a few colossal machines that seemed to be revolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism of conquered and resigned leviathans. Immaculately clean, inconceivably tidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful ceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and solitude. . . . It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand horsepower, and that if the spell were lifted the elevators of New York would be immediately paralysed, and the twenty million lights expire beneath the eyes of a startled population. (qtd. in Nye 134)

In addition to stressing the paradoxical conjunction of terrific noise with silence, both Crane’s poem and Bennett’s description dwell on the sight of the gleaming machinery making circular motions. The “magical stillness, silence, and solitude” that Bennett describes makes the plant appear “enchanted and inexplicable” to him. Crane, too, represents the power house as “inexplicable” by linking the impression it makes on the senses with the action of “Stars” that “prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs.” The power house is in some sense proverbial, embodying old, enigmatic, and “ammoniac” truths, harsh messages that function as bracing stimulants. Harsh as the power house’s impact on the senses is, however, Crane also associates it with the soothing qualities of “velvet.” The “velvet hummed / Of dynamos”

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is a synecdoche for the evening sky that emphasizes its soft, luxurious texture. Rather than intruding upon this “velvet,” the dynamo infuses it with a gentle, soothing “hum.” Another similarity between these two representations of the power house is that both resort to theriomorphic tropes, though with revealingly different emphases. Bennett’s machine-animals have been utterly subdued, possessing the grim “fatalism of conquered and resigned leviathans.” These conquered beasts are emblems of the received notion that humanity’s triumph over nature is the inevitable consequence of technological progress. Crane’s poem also alludes to the cliché in which technology “harnesses” nature’s powers, especially in the reference to the “harnessed jelly of the stars.” The machine-animals incorporated into the representation of the power house are also described as being under control in the image of frogs’ eyes that are “axle-bound” and “confined / In coiled precision.” But these images of control and order are in tension with the contrasting images of unbridled power that mark the stanza. Even the frogs’ eyes, though confined, are on the verge of breaking free as we hear them “giggling” with “mutual glee.” The extent to which Crane represents the power station as imbued with animal vigor is most apparent in the extended simile in which these ballbearings are figured as both frogs’ eyes and the bowels of a bird. But there are also several less obvious instances of theriomorphic tropes placed at the beginning of the passage. Before seeing this grandiose symbol of modernity, we hear its distinctive sound, “The nasal whine of power.” According to the OED, whining sounds had by the 1920s already become associated with the sound of machinery, but they of course have much older associations with horses, dogs, and other animals, as well as with human nasality. The other animal trope, which is much more subtle, appears in the three lines that depict the plant’s smokestacks as they “spoor the evening sky.” “Spoor” resembles “spear,” orthographically and aurally, and the syntax of the sentence reinforces the impression that the smoke is rising into the sky with the violence of a spear. Moreover, this spoor/spear is but one of several phallic objects and acts of puncturing that mark these lines: the “spouting pillars,” the “looming stacks,” and the stars that “prick the eyes.” These phrases are also linked to one another by alliteration and other sonic repetitions (“sp,” “st,” “p,” “r,” “l”). Although Crane is deliberately encouraging the reader to misread “spoor” as a synonym for “spear” (through what may be thought of as an implied but unwritten near-rhyme), the word “spoor” in fact takes us into the animal kingdom. The trail or track of an animal, person, or vehicle, “spoor” is most often encountered in the parlance of hunting, where it designates the trail of wild game. To spoor is to track an animal by the signs

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it leaves behind, a kind of code by which hunters discover their prey. Here Crane inverts conventional usage, replacing hunters (the customary subject of the verb), with the beast itself, which “spoors,” or imprints, its environment. Like an animal, then, the factory “spoors” the sky, leaving its distinctive mark on the landscape as a kind of hieroglyph awaiting interpretation. With this trope of “spooring,” Crane assimilates machines to wild animals; he also points toward a poetics of difficulty that “spoors” the text with enigmatic figures of speech. The factory that “spoors” the sky is but one example of how Crane’s representation of the power house simultaneously describes and displays the technology of poetic language. “Hearing’s leash is strummed,” Crane writes, by the dynamo, but the reader’s hearing is also “strummed” by the verse itself, which is loaded to excess with the various form of repetition that are the stock in trade of poetry. Crane deploys a plethora of alliterative clusters (including p’s, b’s, s’s, g’s); he plays initial, medial, and terminal sounds off of one another; and he engages in much internal rhyme and near-rhyme (power, spouting, spoor, looming, etc.). He even turns to orthographic repetition as a way of making a direct impact upon the reader’s visual experience of the poem, an avant-garde modernist gesture more often associated with the “visual poetics” of such figures as Williams, Cummings, Pound, or the even more radical experiments of Bob Brown.19 This is manifested in the unusually high concentration of words that contain doubled letters, a partial list of which includes: pillars, spoor, looming, ammoniac, hummed, strummed, bobbin, stropped, booming, spools, spurred,—these last three instances occurring in consecutive words—bouillon, harnessed, jelly (again three in a row), giggling, steely, gizzards, glee, and murmurless. These orthographic pairings make visible the technology of writing, helping to make Crane’s power house a display of both mechanical power and the power of, and over, poetic language. PROSTHETIC TECHNOLOGY Crane evokes the power house in a showy display of rhetorical tricks that gives the illusion of language itself out of control. The verse is in fact manipulated with extreme attention, as Crane himself hints in the description of the bearings as “confined in coiled precision,” which draws an implicit analogy between the “precision” of technology and poetic control. But the impression of being ungoverned is important, because it raises the fear that the mechanical technology of the power house is also out of control, and that rather than extending the body’s capacity to move, see, or hear, it will

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become ungovernable and will inflict its violence against the body. This is the anxiety behind Crane’s question: “Towards what?” Rather than answering, Crane provokes more questions by representing the violent sound of machinery with an enigmatic trope: “The forked crash of split thunder parts / Our hearing momentwise” (79). On the one hand, this passage represents technology in the act of assaulting the body’s perceptual systems. But Crane is also playing with the cliché that loud sounds are “ear-splitting.” Enjambing on “parts,” Crane draws attention to this ambiguous verb, suggesting that we are being deafened, or “parted” from our hearing. But the thunder also “parts,” or divides, our hearing “momentwise.” Here Crane figures moments of time in spatial terms: just as an object may be cut lengthwise, so time may be sliced “momentwise.” The effect of the noise, then, is to fragment the sense of time by dividing it into discrete moments. Rather than deafening the ear, the thunderous noise paradoxically enables it to distinguish sounds “momentwise,” that is, moment by moment. This capacity to discriminate one moment from another resembles the ability of a reader to scan a line of poetry and analyze its meter foot by foot. Although the sound of technology threatens to overwhelm the body, Crane embeds in his trope the potential to reverse this violence into an enhancement of the human sensorium. Technology’s extension of perceptual powers is, moreover, figured in terms that associate technology with the sensual pleasures of poetry. Representations of the body in the act of seeing and hearing are by no means limited to this depiction of the power house. With only four exceptions, every one of “Cape Hatteras’s” sixteen stanzas features auditory and optical experiences. In most instances, watching and listening are paired with each other, emphasizing the poem’s concern with the totality of human perception and the way it parallels, is enhanced by, or threatened by, technology. A partial list of these eye/ear binaries includes: “radio static” that “foams in our ears” paired with the effect of time as it “clears / Our lenses” (stanza 2); Whitman’s hearing, represented in the description of when he “heard the wraith,” paired with his eyes, which “gleam from the great stones” (stanza 4); stars that “prick the eyes” while “hearing’s leash is strummed” by the dynamo (stanza 5); “eyes raised in pride” juxtaposed with the sound of a grenade’s “screaming petals” (stanza 7); the “sparkling visibility” of a sky suffused with a “screeching gale” (stanza 8); the pilot whose eyes are “bicarbonated white by speed” is also commanded, “pilot, hear!” (stanza 9); stars that “have grooved our eyes” parallel the figurative listening involved in the reading of Whitman, who is able to “answer deepest soundings” (stanza 11); and, finally, the visual magnificence of nature’s “clustrous sheen” of flowers is matched by “speechful” “moonlight,” “thunder’s eloquence,” and “trumpet’s

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breathing in each clump and grass tuft” (stanza 13). Although the presence of audition falls off to some degree in the Whitman segment of the poem, the ear returns in the form of an important trope for literary power in the final triumphant lines of “Cape Hatteras.” In addition to the declaration that Whitman’s “vision is reclaimed,” and the speaker’s exhortation to “see! the rainbow’s arch,” Crane inserts an auricular trope that alludes to Whitman’s iconography of the “Open Road,” as well as to the mastery over poetic meter that Crane himself is claiming. “Recorders ages hence,” Crane writes, “shall hear” Whitman’s “sure tread”—and, by implication, Crane’s as well. This list by no means does justice to each eye/ear pairing, but it establishes the degree to which the poem is pervaded by the motif of perception. In the margin of one of the many fragmentary drafts for “Cape Hatteras,” Crane scribbled the words “Seeing” and “Hearing,” thereby signaling the poem’s underlying preoccupation with the body as a perceptual mechanism.20 The “Seeing/Hearing” notation on Crane’s worksheets also raises the larger issue of the interpenetration of nature and technology. The notation appears beside an early version of the sestet that is folded into the poem’s third stanza. These six lines end the stanza with a tightly wound prosody that clicks into place with the emphatic closure of the gears of a machine: But that star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sluiced by motion,—subjugated never. Adam and Adam’s answer in the forest Left Hesperus mirrored in the lucid pool. Now the eagle dominates our days, is jurist Of the ambiguous cloud. We know the strident rule Of wings imperious . . . Space, instantaneous, Flickers a moment, consumes us in its smile: A flash over the horizon—shifting gears— And we have laughter, or more sudden tears. Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact From which we wake into the dream of act; Seeing himself an atom in a shroud— Man hears himself an engine in a cloud! (77–8)

With their tone of oracular assurance driven home by the crescendo of three successive pairs of end-rhymes, the final couplet proposes two tropes for the human body, one of radical reduction, the other surcharged with power. “Adam” recurs here, by way of a pun, as “atom.” Conceiving of the self as

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“an atom” is a synecdochic gesture, the atom as the microscopic part standing in for the macrocosmic body, or “Adam,” who is, of course, himself a synecdoche for humanity. Placing Adam/atom “in a shroud,” Crane suggests that the “realm of fact” engenders a mechanistic conception of the self in which the individual is merely a collections of “atom[s] in a shroud,” physical particles already enshrined in death. It is an image of death-in-life couched in the vocabulary of twentieth-century atomic physics. The worksheets for “Cape Hatteras” reveal that “atom” was originally “spectre,” which demonstrates that as the poem took shape in Crane’s mind, he chose to employ the idiom of modern science, in this case so as to emphasize the dystopian aspect of modernity. Yet as Crane hints at the start of the sestet, this is a poem continually “shifting gears.” The dash that cuts off the penultimate line of the stanza signals one of the more abrupt transitions of the poem. From this ominous figure of the human body compressed to an atom, Crane thrusts the reader forward to another figure in which the body is imagined as “an engine in a cloud.” This line is sometimes read as reinforcing, rather than contrasting with, the previous line’s representation of modern science as a malevolent force.21 The power of flight is of course an ancient trope for human empowerment, though not without its cautionary undertones, as in the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, to which Crane alludes several times in the poem, and which in fact appears by name in the manuscripts. The worksheets also drive home the positive reading of this line, since in one version the word “yet” makes the contrast between the lines unambiguous: “Yet hears a locomotive in a cloud.” Like the change from “spectre” to “atom,” replacing “locomotive” with “engine” updates the poem to the twentieth century, since if the “engine” is in a “cloud,” it is clearly a synecdoche for an airplane. Crane’s decision to drop “yet” may simply have been a matter of adjusting syntax to meter, but it is also possible that he wished to leave some doubts about the contrast in order to emphasize that the Faustian desire to fly always brings with it the potential for tragedy. In these lines, hearing an airplane is momentous not only because the technological feat of flight appears to have transformed the Daedalus myth into reality, but because this perceptual event is equated with the conceptualization of the body as an engine. As Anson Rabinbach has argued, the nineteenth-century view of the body as a thermodynamic motor has its roots in both Aristotle’s mechanical metaphors for human physiology and the Enlightenment fascination with “automata,” intricate mechanical models of humans and animals designed to show the similarity between nature and reason.22 The tension between the two halves of Crane’s couplet exemplifies how in the twentieth century this analogy between bodies and machines becomes fraught with a sense

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of crisis. Although technology extends the capacities of the body by making possible such a thing as flight, it also magnifies the body’s inadequacies, encouraging us to conceive of the body as a collection of lifeless atomic particles. This sense of a cultural crisis that affects the conception of our very bodies makes its mark on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which first appeared in English in 1930, the same year in which The Bridge was published. In the process of trying to account for the widespread hostility to civilization, Freud addresses the positive and negative effects of technological progress, in particular as they relate to conceptions of the body as a machine. In Freud’s view, people have become disillusioned with civilization because technology has greatly magnified our power over nature, but has failed to solve the problems of social unhappiness (39). Reviewing the development of technology over time, Freud links technological innovation with the surmounting of corporeal limitations: “With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning” (43). He then illustrates how modern technology has enabled humans to overcome the limits imposed upon them by their bodies: Motor power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina. (43)

The parallels between this description and Crane’s figuration of technological progress are quite striking. Like Freud, Crane emphasizes human perception, and he represents the powers of the human eye in mechanical terms when he writes that “time clears / Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects / A periscope” (77). Freud’s treatment of the relationship between technology and the body culminates with the following invocation of “prosthesis” as a figure for this relationship: These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism . . . do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every—or of almost every—fairy-tale wish. . . . Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these

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The Machine that Sings gods were cultural ideals. To-day he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgement of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. (44–5)

Just as Freud draws a comparison between new technologies and “fairy tales,” so Crane populates his poem with fantastic beasts as tropes for technology, thus conveying the idea that such innovations as airplanes, skyscrapers, and power houses are the “actual fulfillment of every . . . fairy-tale wish.” The feelings of “omnipotence” created by these machines are echoed in “Cape Hatteras” by its numerous anthropomorphic, theriomorphic, and mechanomorphic tropes, all surcharged with excessive power. Freud’s assertion that technology has transformed “Man” into a “prosthetic God” relies on the same metaphorical equivalence between bodies and machines that informs Crane’s poem. Like so many of Crane’s catachrestic tropes, Freud’s “prosthesis” may be read with contrary emphases, as Freud himself suggests in his concluding allusion to the “trouble” with prosthetic devices. A prosthesis, of course, is an artificial device that replaces a part of the body that is missing or damaged. In other words, a prosthesis compensates for what the body lacks. Prosthetic additions to the body may, however, be thought of in a more positive sense as extrapolations of human capacities, as Tim Armstrong argues in Modernism, Technology and the Body. According to Armstrong, during the nineteenth century conceptions of the body as a motor came together with the theory of evolution and the idea of technological progress to produce a “positive prosthesis.” In this utopian outlook, technology offers what Armstrong calls a “reformed body, more powerful and capable” than the natural body (78). That is, the “positive prosthesis” does not replace what is missing; it supplies something that was never there. An airplane is in this sense a “positive prosthesis,” since it makes it possible for the human body to fly. Freud’s ruminations on technology and Crane’s poem hold the positive and negative senses of prosthesis in tension with each other. On the one hand, Freud writes, our “auxiliary organs”—that is, technology—have made us “truly magnificent.” Like a medical prosthesis, however, these organs are compensating for bodily defects that have not truly gone away, which means they will “still give him much trouble at times.”

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In “Cape Hatteras,” there are several examples of technology figured as a prosthesis that extends human capacities. The most salient of these is probably the equivalence drawn between “Man” and the airplane, the “engine in a cloud” that so magnifies human powers of locomotion that the body is able to fly. Another instance of the prosthetic trope occurs in a passage briefly touched on above. In these lines, Crane focuses on the eyes, the body’s primary tool of perception: Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see How from thy path above the levin’s lance Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor chance To reckon—as thy stilly eyes partake What alcohol of space . . ! (80–1)

Like the dynamo’s overwhelming sound, technology assaults the human body with violent transformative energy, clouding the eyes as if by an infusion of sodium bicarbonate. On one level, Crane is simply translating into metaphorical terms what many early aviators described as the intoxication of flight. One 1916 account, for example, dwells on “the wonderful panorama spread beneath and all around, the exhilarating rush of air in the face, the consciousness of speed . . . the extraordinary sensation of buoyancy” (qtd. in Kern 246). This description reminds us that the cockpits of the early planes were open to the air, and it is the impact of this “rush of air” that Crane depicts as “bicarbonating” the eyes, making them go white with effervescence. On the one hand, this seems to be another instance in which the body is “surcharged” with a technological energy that extends its capacities. Yet the whitened eyes also suggest blindness, bringing the contrary sense that technology has inflicted violence upon the body and impaired, not enhanced, its abilities. The trope thus mingles the positive and negative poles of prosthetic devices. Like a prosthesis, bicarbonate of soda is used medicinally in order to correct a physical ailment, namely, to cure hangovers and indigestion. Crane’s trope is thus double-edged, suggesting that technology’s intoxication of the body raises the risk of a serious hangover—a hangover that is paradoxically soothed by the “bicarbonating” effects of technology. THE UNCANCELLED COVENANT OF THE BRIDGE The positive and negative aspects of a prosthesis are in some sense analogous to Crane’s ambivalent attitude toward technological progress. On the one hand, Crane is exhilarated by the machines of modernity, treating them as

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embodiments of the technological sublime. As in all sublime experiences, however, the sense of overwhelming power creates a residue of negativity that is never quite shaken off. In “Cape Hatteras,” this negativity is manifested in the anxiety that the very machines which extend the capacities of the human body also threaten to destroy the body. One of the ways in which Crane copes with these contrary apprehensions of modernity is by proposing a kind of mathematical equation in which the negativity of technological progress is itself negated. This “formula” appears in the lines directly preceding the couplet in which the ominous “spectre” of an atomized humanity is juxtaposed with the transcendent capacity of flight: Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact From which we wake into the dream of act; Seeing himself an atom in a shroud— Man hears himself an engine in a cloud! (78)

The first half of this quatrain resembles an equation in which two dreams balanced against one another “cancel” each other out. As in an arithmetic formula, this cancellation signifies the removal of equivalent quantities from the opposite sides of an equation. As Lee Edelman has proposed, “history is read here as a sequence of cancellations in a formula that proposes a deliberate gesture of confusion and reversal” (219). The worksheets for “Cape Hatteras” provide additional evidence for Edelman’s reading, since the phrase “the inescapable equation” appears several times, although it is never employed in the final text. Even more striking is a notation that Crane made on one manuscript page: “complete transition to equation.”23 One way of paraphrasing the terms of this “formula” is to consider the “new realm of fact” a periphrasis for the empiricism of the modern age. The “dream” of scientific truth, then, has replaced the prior “dream” of religious truth, leaving us in the “dream of act,” a pragmatist state of mind in which conditional truths are arrived at based on how they “act,” or perform, in the real world. But by leaving the dreams unspecified, Crane suggests that the “dreams” he speaks of are the cultural “myths” by which every age defines itself. As we have seen, for Crane one of the most important of these myths in the twentieth century is science itself. Crane’s decision to use a tool of scientific knowledge—an equation— in order to represent the evolution of culture is consistent with the scientific idiom he employs throughout “Cape Hatteras.” Unlike most of the other instances of scientific terminology, however, the formula of cancellation introduced at this early stage of the poem does not point to the

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interpenetration of nature and technology. The formula is instead a trope for Crane’s poetic covenant—a covenant with Whitman, with literary history, and of course with his readers. Although Edelman draws attention to the “formulaic” quality of these lines, he neglects to read them in connection with the final stanza of “Cape Hatteras” in which the formula of cancellation recurs in a strikingly different form: And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space, Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light— Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pass out of sight To course that span of consciousness thou’st named The Open Road—thy vision is reclaimed! What heritage thou’st signalled to our hands! And see! the rainbow’s arch—how shimmeringly stands Above the Cape’s ghoul-mound, O joyous seer! Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread And read thee by the aureole ‘round thy head Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus! yes, Walt, Afoot again, and onward without halt,— Not soon, nor suddenly,—no, never to let go My hand in yours, Walt Whitman— so— (84)

In this final address to Whitman, what had been cancelled is declared “uncancelled,” a term that signifies the negation of that which has already been negated. In addition to its arithmetic significations, “cancel” is often used to describe the breaking of vows or covenants. The uncancellation of Whitman’s “tread” may thus be seen as the reparation of a broken covenant. Alluding to the earlier depiction of Whitman’s Civil War vigils at the “Ghoul-mound of man’s perversity” (82), Crane places his rainbow over the “Cape’s ghoulmound,” the site of both technological triumph and the “fraternal massacre” exacerbated by technological progress. In these climactic lines, Crane renews Whitman’s mythology of “The Open Road” by “uncancelling” the covenant that had been “cancelled” by

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the dystopian aspect of technology. Rather than simply adopting Whitman’s posture toward technological and social progress, Crane proposes that this kind of American utopianism may be recuperated through a negative process of “un-doing.” The figurative acts of cancelling and uncancelling that frame this pivotal section of The Bridge represent Crane’s reinvigoration of Whitman’s Faustian drive to move “onward without halt.” The goal of this movement is the idealized state of unity evoked in “Atlantis,” in which “orphic strings . . . leap and converge” toward “One Song, One Bridge of Fire!” (108). Yet this state of unity is fraught with the contradictory pressures alluded to in the final line of The Bridge: “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing” (108). Just as Crane’s technological figures for the body hold perfection and disintegration in dialectical tension, these antiphonal voices swing between the perpetual cancelling and uncancelling of the covenant of The Bridge. * * * The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx’s classic study of the pastoral ideal in American culture, emphasizes the antagonism between the triumphal attitude toward technological progress so pervasive in American society, and the critique of this faith in progress often voiced by American writers. As I have shown, Crane’s representation of machinery in “Cape Hatteras” acknowledges the potential threats posed by technological advances, but Crane also depicts the machines of modernity as genuinely sublime, as embodiments of the same primal power that he seeks to recover in the animality of the human body. In this sense, my analysis of “Cape Hatteras” shows that Crane is an important exception to the overarching thesis of Marx’s book. In fact, in the “Cutty Sark” section of The Bridge, Crane figures technology as a trope for poetry itself in the form of a singing machine cast as a whitened emblem of purity. During his encounter with an aging sailor in a South Street bar, the speaker imagines the workings of the sailor’s addled mind: I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind; or are there frontiers—running sands sometimes running sands—somewhere—sands running . . . Or they may start some white machine that sings. Then you may laugh and dance the axletree— steel—silver—kick the traces—and know— (72)

The “white machine that sings” is another of Crane’s contradictory tropes for the body. Figured here as a hallucinated structure that exists at the “frontiers” of the mind, the singing machine is linked to a breakdown in mental

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activity, as the mind loses the capacity to measure the “running sands” of time. Switching on the machine leads, however, to various forms of bodily release—to laughter, dancing, “kicking the traces,” and, finally, to a new kind of knowledge (“and know”), based in corporeal experience, which breaches the “frontiers” of mind with its corporeal song.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Unless indicated otherwise, all references to Crane’s letters are to O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, eds. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber (New York and London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997); all references to Crane’s poetry are to Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York: Liveright, 1986). Other references to Crane’s letters and prose will be indicated by the following abbreviations: CPS The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966. HCW Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, ed. Thomas Parkinson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. LHC The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, ed. Brom Weber. New York: Hermitage House, 1952. LCF The Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, ed. Thomas S. W. Lewis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. 2. Douglas borrows the phrase “terrible honesty” from Raymond Chandler’s statement that “all writers are a little crazy but if they are any good they have a kind of terrible honesty” (qtd. in Douglas 33). For her exposition of the “histrionic truthfulness” (33) of American modernism during the 1920s, see especially Chapter 1, “White Manhattan in the Age of ‘Terrible Honesty’” (31–72). 3. Much of the revisionary scholarship on modernism originates in African American and gender studies, including two landmark works, Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–94). Among other studies challenging the received history of modernism that prevailed during the era of New Criticism, some

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Notes to Chapter One of the most important are Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Huyssen re-visits his notion of the cultural divide in “High/Low in an Expanded Field” (Modernism/ Modernity 9.3 (2002) 363–374), in which he asserts that his definition of the Great Divide has been “misconstrued . . . as a static binary of high modernism vs. the market” (366), although he also revises his earlier paradigm, arguing that it is “place- and time-specific” and therefore inapplicable to the expanded global perspective on modernism that he now advocates. In addition, in “Definitional Excursus: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism” (Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (2001) 493–513), Susan Stanford Friedman provides an illuminating overview of the many conflicting uses of the terms “modernism” and “modernity,” explicating the clash between the way these are defined in the humanities, in which they usually connote rupture, and in the social sciences, in which they usually refer to the imposition of a hegemonic order. Rather than seeking any fixed definition for modernism, Friedman argues that these contradictions point toward the term’s “dialogic meanings” that “reflect the different positionalities of their producers” (509). 4. Brian M. Reed’s Hart Crane: After His Lights (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), which was published just as this book was going to press, is an important addition to the new scholarship on Crane and on modernism in general. Like my study, Reed’s book seeks to move beyond the first wave of queer readings of Crane that were inaugurated by Martin and Yingling. One of Reed’s goals is to demonstrate that the three “labels typically, even automatically, applied” to Crane “in recent criticism—American, queer, modernist—prove as likely to obfuscate as to reveal the origins, character, and aspirations” (10) of his poetry.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Brunner, who provides the most detailed chronology of Crane’s work on The Bridge (see chapters 7–10), asserts that the following ten sections were written at least in part during these months: “To Brooklyn Bridge,” “Ave Maria,” “Cutty Sark,” “Three Songs,” “Harbor Dawn,” “Van Winkle,” the quatrain section of “The River,” “The Dance,” “The Tunnel,” and “Atlantis.”

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Hammer calls the time between the fall of 1925 and the summer of 1926 “the pivotal period of Crane’s career” (123). 2. The dating of “General Aims and Theories,” arguably Crane’s most important prose statement, remains uncertain. Largely on the basis of internal evidence linking it to “Voyages,” Unterecker believes that the period during 1924 in which Crane was also writing parts of “Voyages” is the most likely date (377). Brunner, on the other hand, argues for the later date of 1926, identifying the piece with notes Crane prepared to help Eugene O’Neill write the introduction to White Buildings that, in the end, O’Neill never wrote (259n3). See Crane’s March 17, 1926 letter to Gorham Munson (231) for additional evidence for this later date. 3. Speculation about the relation between language and the body (the subject of much recent writing on the body), has been heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Drawing on Lacan, Peter Brooks describes this relation in a way that resonates with Crane’s poetry, even though Brooks is concerned not with poetry but with how “modern narratives appear to produce a semioticization of the body which is matched by a somatization of story.” This thesis about modern narrative is based on his Lacanian view of the role of language in human consciousness: The body furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, and eventually of language itself, which then takes us away from the body, but always in a tension that reminds us that mind and language need to recover the body, as an otherness that is somehow primary to their very definition. (xii-xiii) Crane’s poetry is suffused with just this tension between embodiment and disembodiment.

4. Several of Crane’s early poems also address the eroticized body, though not as directly as the three upon which this chapter focuses. Such poems as “Carmen de Boheme” and “Modern Craft” are interesting for the way they foreshadow Crane’s mature treatment of the erotic. See Martin’s discussion of “Modern Craft” (Homosexual 118–20). 5. Thus read, the lines describe a chiasmus, one of the principal rhetorical tropes that Edelman views as key to Crane’s style (7–21). 6. Joseph Riddel views this paradoxical crafting of an impure language in order to purify as evidence of Crane’s “failure.” I do not share this evaluation, but his cogent description of Crane’s poetry underlines the centrality of the pure-impure dialectic to his work. According to Riddel, Crane’s language “achieves, or seeks to, an intensity of rhythm and movement that overrides intellect and purifies it. The poem aspires toward the tranquility and silence of ‘belle isle’ (monistic union), but the language ironically will not let go, and ultimately disdains the end in which it would consume itself ” (99). 7. The well-known line, “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,” from “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe” (1877), refers obliquely to the theory of poetic purity Poe expounds in “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Composition.” Poe bases his notion that a long poem is a “flat contradiction in terms” (415) on the argument that it is impossible to sustain for too long the primary aim of poetry: “That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived . . . from the contemplation of the Beautiful” (420). Eliot’s essay “From Poe to Valery” remains an indispensable account of how Poe’s ideal of poetic purity acquired international currency among modern poets via the French Symbolists. Edelman analyzes an almost identical play on the genitive in Crane’s early poem “Naiad of Memory” (45). See especially Chapter 4 of Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture, “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” See Longenbach’s account of Crane’s evolving relation to Eliot, which draws particular attention to Crane’s admiration for Eliot’s 1919 piece in The Egoist, “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry.” Athenaeum, October 17, 1919 (qtd. in Bergonzi 74). According to Bergonzi, Eliot read Frazer as early as 1913 while at Harvard (26). Crane attended an orchestral performance of Petrushka, conducted by Stravinsky himself, in 1925, as he recounts in a letter (203). It is unclear whether he ever saw the ballet, but it is very likely, since it was performed in Cleveland while he lived there in 1921, a time during which he associated with several modern composers, including Ernst Bloch. In a 1921 review of the ballet, Edith Sitwell associates Petrushka with Laforgue’s Pierrot poems. See Petrushka: An Authoritative Score of the Original Version, Background, Analysis, Essays, Views, and Comments (Charles Ham, ed. New York: Norton, 1967). Also see Catriona Kelly, Petrushka, The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), for an examination of how Stravinsky appropriated the clown of popular Russian puppetry to the modernist figure of Pierrot. Elisa New’s powerful reading of Crane as an “articulate sinner, heir to Augustine” (187) is also concerned with the dialectic of purity. Although she stresses the anti-Emersonian animus in Crane that reflects a Calvinist religiosity, her argument that limits and the sense of sin (in my terms, defilement) are the key to Crane complements my reading of his poems of erotic crisis. See her chapter, “Hand of Fire: Crane.” Among all the critical studies on Crane, only Brunner and Woods take any note of the revision. Brunner, however, buries his comments in a footnote, remarking only that the earlier version is “more sexually traumatic” (261). Woods devotes a short paragraph to the revision, stating that Crane dropped the line in order to avoid “explicit pornographic description” (146). Martin and Yingling both give considerable weight to “Possessions,” yet neither of them makes any mention of the revision. Indeed, in Martin’s view “Possessions” is “probably the first poem of the urban homosexual in search of sex” (127–8). Hammer explores the relation between Crane’s homosexuality and

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16. 17. 18.

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his writing, yet he does not address “Possessions.” Even Tim Dean, in his impressively argued dissent from the view that Crane’s poetics of difficulty are underwritten by encoded references to homosexuality, reads “Possessions” without any reference to this revision. Weber prints manuscript and magazine texts throughout his 1948 study, as well as an extensive selection of early manuscript versions of “Atlantis” in an appendix. These texts are cited in much of Crane scholarship. The Little Review text of “Possessions” (spring 1924, Vol. 10, No. 1) is reprinted in Weber (225). See Tashjian (116–143) for the most thorough treatment of the vicissitudes of the short-lived Broom. Between 1918 and 1920, the Post Office confiscated four issues of The Little Review for publishing episodes of Ulysses. Margaret Anderson, the magazine’s editor, discusses the situation in her memoir, My Thirty Years’ War (206–67). See Hammer for an interesting discussion of how the enthusiasm Crane shared with other writers for Ulysses and other suppressed works constituted a “fantasy of membership in an elite world of letters” (126). In addition, see “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and AngloAmerican Modernism,” Loren Glass’s eye-opening analysis of the integral relationship between obscenity and modernism (Critical Inquiry. 32 (Winter 2006): 341–61). In addition to Foucault, see Goldberg’s discussion of definitions of sodomy (1–26). See The Collected Poems (83). See also the notes to Brom Weber’s edition of the poems, in which “rase” is restored (CPS 276). Allen Tate, writing in 1952, supplies one of the most egregious of these comments: “The ‘causes’ of homosexuality are no doubt as various as the causes of other neuroses. But the effect on the lives of its victims seems to be uniform: they are convinced that they cannot be loved, and they become incapable of loving. . . .[Homosexuals] may have affection or sex, but not both; or if both, both are diluted and remote” (325–6). Tate’s ambivalent relation to Crane’s homosexuality is covered in depth by Hammer (see especially 122–137). Although Hammer’s objective is “to reverse the general direction of Yingling’s analysis in order to examine the ways in which Crane’s homosexual writing was also a modernism” (124), he shares Yingling’s premise as his point of departure: “The success of Yingling’s argument is to show that Crane’s modernism was specifically a homosexual writing, a gay semiotic that should be read in relation to other minority codes in high culture and everyday life . . .Yingling has undone the universality Crane’s writing appears to claim for itself, and has analyzed it as a minority discourse” (124). Yingling is quoting Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (1979). The emphasis is Bennett’s. This poetic fragment, marked by references to “disfigurement” and “arms, torn white and mild away,” is an important precursor to the three poems I

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22. 23.

24.

Notes to Chapter One examine in this chapter. It also includes the first appearance of the phrase “white buildings” (192); indeed, Crane tells Toomer in a letter that he plans to use this phrase as the poem’s title. Thus the source of the title of Crane’s first book is an emblem for the purity sought in the defiling episode of erotic anguish evoked in “This Way Where November Takes the Leaf.” See Unterecker (325–7) and Fisher (198–9) for accounts of the circumstances surrounding the poem. Crane’s presumption in this letter that sexuality requires purification reflects what Martin calls “the ‘trap’ of Platonism. Homosexuality was ‘higher’ than heterosexuality because more spiritual and less physical; the assertion of a homosexual identity was then at odds with the fulfillment of homosexual desire” (Homosexual 122). See Hammer’s discussion of “the rapid shuttle in Crane’s letters [to Underwood] between intellectual and sexual enthusiasms” (126). In a 1944 essay (substantially revised in 1959), the poet Robert Duncan attacks what he sees as the misguided attempt to deny Crane’s “universalism.” He rebukes those who betray the spirit of gay writers like Melville, Proust, and Crane by projecting onto their work “a cult of homosexual superiority to heterosexual values” (41). Duncan is vehemently opposed to the tendency to “obscure the work of all those who have viewed homosexuality as but one of the many ways in which human love may take and who have had primarily in mind as they wrote (as Melville, Proust, or Crane had) mankind and its liberation. . . . It is, however, the body of Crane that has been most ravaged by these modern ghouls and, once ravaged, stuck up cult-wise in the mystic light of their special cemetery literature. . . .Where the Zionists of homosexuality have laid claim to a Palestine of their own— asserting in their miseries their nationality; Crane’s sufferings, his rebellion and his love are sources of poetry for him, not because they are what makes him different from his fellow-men, but because he saw in them his link with mankind; he saw in them his share in universal human experience” (44–5). Although Duncan’s invocation of “universalism” reflects the now dated rhetoric of the postwar era, the intensity of Duncan’s attack on other members of the gay community is of interest for the way in which it shows how even as early as 1944, Crane’s legacy as a gay poet was a matter of virulent ideological debate. Pound’s famous three rules first appeared in the United States in the March 1913 issue of Poetry: 1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome (Literary 3). In using the term “Imagism,” I refer primarily to Pound’s concepts. Most historians agree that the term as popularized so successfully by Amy Lowell

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refers in a loose way to a combination of spare diction and free verse rather than to the theory of the image that grows out of late Romanticism and Symbolism. The more conceptual dimensions of “Imagism” resurface in the shortlived “Vorticist” movement. See Perkins (329–36) and Kenner (173–91).

25. Albert Gelpi also considers Crane’s disparagement of “impressionism” a reference to Imagism (398–9), but he views Crane primarily as what he terms a “Symboliste” and does not address the implications of Crane’s explicit appeal to “the imaged Word” in “Voyages.” Because of his guiding thesis that Romanticism and Modernism are linked via the “dialectical split” between Imagism and “Symbolisme,” he focuses on Crane’s differences from Imagism and downplays his attraction to the concept of the poetic image. 26. See Weber for the text and dating of “Belle Isle” (391). 27. See Edelman’s detailed reading of this passage, which he considers an exemplary instance of Crane’s catachrestic poetics (165–8). 28. Paul’s view that Crane’s allusion “denies” Whitman’s line (161) seems inconsistent with the affirmative ending of “Voyages VI.” 29. Nearly one-quarter of the poems in White Buildings are written in quatrains, most with some degree of rhyming, and many others include quatrains or irregular stanzas with the ghosts of the quatrain implied by them. Crane also turns to the form in The Bridge (in “To Brooklyn Bridge,” the second half of “The River,” “The Dance,” and “National Winter Garden”), in many of the “Key West” poems, and in “The Broken Tower,” his final poem on purity. See Leibowitz’s discussion of the quatrain in Crane (194–208). 30. See Schenck for a reading of “Voyages” as a poem in the tradition of pastoral elegy in which such scenes of initiation are conventional (168–73). 31. Lewis sees “Belle Isle” as possibly a reference to an island north of Newfoundland (172). Paul reads it as an allusion to Eliot’s “Gerontion,” which also mentions a “Belle Isle” (163). Yingling stresses the allusion to Baudelaire’s “Un Voyage à Cythère” (103). 32. Paul names her Venus (162); Brunner calls her Aurora (51); and to Lewis she is Eos, goddess of the dawn, although Lewis agrees that viewing the goddess solely in the context of classical mythology is unhelpful (176–7). 33. See Schenck’s discussion of “the peculiar eroticism—at once bridal and funereal—of the bouquet” (171). 34. Schenck clarifies the erotic dimension of the phoenix image by elucidating how the phoenix was used as a poetic convention in epithalamions. She reads Crane’s phoenix as an allusion to Crashaw’s “Epithalamion” (172). 35. Ann Douglas discusses numerous writers, performers, and other cultural figures who either kept actual menageries or were associated, in one way or another, with animals. These include Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Robert Ripley, Helen Morgan, Babe Ruth, Marianne Moore, Martha Graham, Djuna Barnes, and Eugene O’Neill (44–54). 36. See Sieburth for the most thorough account of Gourmont’s influence on Pound. Other useful accounts of the Gourmont-Pound connection are

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available in Davie and Espey. Also see Bergonzi’s discussion of Eliot’s debt to Gourmont (58–68). See Burne for a more a general treatment of Gourmont’s impact on Anglo-American modernism. 37. For an overview of sexology and its relation to psychoanalysis, see Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1985), 61–120. See also the two important anthologies edited by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 38. Yingling is one of the few critics to explore this dimension of Crane’s figure, which he characterizes as “the naming of the body as a threshold” (137). Much recent Crane scholarship tends to overlook “The Wine Menagerie.” Edelman and Hammer, for instance, give it virtually no attention at all. R. P. Blackmur’s 1935 reading of this climactic stanza of the poem has been admired for many years. His gloss is extremely acute in its understanding of Crane’s rhetoric, but it shies away from the signification of “anatomies” as bodies, and, thus, from the erotic subject matter of the poem: “We see that thresholds open upon anatomies: upon things to be explained and felt freshly as an adventure; and we see that the anatomies, what is to be explored, are known from a new vantage, and that the vantage is part of the anatomy. The separate meanings of the two words fairly rush at each other; the right ones join and those irrelevant to the juncture are for the moment—the whole time of the poem—lost in limbo. Thus the association “New thresholds, new anatomies!” which at first inspection might seem specious or arbitrary . . . not only does not produce a distortion but, the stress and strain being equal, turns out wholly natural and independently alive” (25). 39. A partial list of these brows includes the “broken brow” (8) of Ernst Nelson elegized in “Praise for an Urn”; the “arc of Helen’s brow” dispensing “blessing and dismay” (32) in “For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen”; and, in “The Dance”—the section of The Bridge most occupied with the body—both Maquokeeta’s “mythical brows” (62) and the “perfect brows” (65) of his bride Pocahontas. Behind these brows lies a passage by Christopher Marlowe, one of the Elizabethans most important to Crane, in which Tamburlaine’s body is described in terms of the Renaissance idea of the human body as microcosm. After rendering his eyes as “A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres,” Marlowe moves on to Tamburlaine’s brow: Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion, Thirsting with sovereignty, with love of arms, His lofty brows in folds do figure death, And in their smoothness amity and life. (16)

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40. In his speech in praise of love, Aristophanes explains that humans were originally “globular in shape” and of three sexes: male, female, and hermaphrodite. Zeus punishes these proto-humans for challenging the gods by splitting them into two beings, leaving “each half with a desperate yearning for the other.” Love is thus the “longing for and following after that primeval wholeness.” With this fable Aristophanes also explains the origin of homosexual men (beings split off from the primeval male), homosexual women (beings split off from the primeval female), and heterosexual men and women (beings split off from the primeval hermaphrodite) (542–46). See Horton (31, 125) and Lewis (26) on Crane’s familiarity with Plato. In a 1926 letter, Crane writes that the “grace” of Plato’s dialogues “partakes of poetry” (233). Also see Trachtenberg’s valuable discussion of Crane’s sources for the Atlantis myth in, among other works, the Timaeus and Critias (Brooklyn 160–65). The epigraph to “Atlantis,” “Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system” (103), is from the Symposium.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. With the important exception of Paul Giles, recent criticism on Crane has accorded “National Winter Garden” even less attention than the New Critical studies of the 1960s and 70s. Hammer and Martin ignore it completely, while Edelman mentions it only once in passing. Brunner’s twopage treatment reiterates the prevailing view that the “violent sexuality” of burlesque is “an expression of misery” (147). Giles gives more attention to the section than any previous critic, but he is more interested in burlesque as a conceptual analogue to punning than as a form of popular culture. Giles takes Crane’s taste for burlesque as evidence for a more thoroughgoing commitment to the pun than I find convincing, going so far as to claim that “the whole of The Bridge is and is intended to be a burlesque performance” (68). In spite of this exaggerated claim, his treatment of burlesque is indispensable because it turns attention to Crane’s enthusiasm for burlesque. 2. For another example of this animus, see a 1927 letter to Allen Tate, in which Crane complains that the poetry “market” is “in the grip of . . . two hysterical virgins,” Harriet Monroe and Marianne Moore, the editors of Poetry and The Dial (319). 3. “The Wine Menagerie” was written between October 1925 and April 1926. See Marc Simon’s dating in Complete Poems (232). “National Winter Garden” was drafted in August 1926. See O My Land (268). 4. Given the neglect of “National Winter Garden,” it is not surprising that the drafts of this section have never received the kind of scrutiny accorded the manuscripts of “Atlantis” and “Cape Hatteras.” The three extant

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Notes to Chapter Two versions reveal many changes that I can only summarize here, but the ones of most significance occur in the final five lines. The earliest text (See Lohf (47), item B38), designated “Isle of Pines, ca. 1926,” concludes with two lines that disappear entirely from the final version: Death is a ululation at so many wrists, —So much per death, so much per bone. This synaesthetic figure for the swaying motion of the dancer’s wrists, likening the ululation of the voice with the undulation of the body, points to the seductiveness of death. Death remains an important factor in the published version, both in the reference to the audience’s return to Magdalene “to die alone,” and in the concluding image of a dismembered skeleton, but it dominates the conclusion of the earlier version, as the word “death” is twice reiterated. Crane may have decided that this was a rhetorical flaw, but there seems to have been thematic concerns behind the change as well. For in addition to cutting both instances of the word “death,” he introduced the imagery of rebirth. The crucial phrase, “the burlesque of our lust,” is also absent from this version, which suggests that as things took shape in Crane’s mind, he chose to sacrifice this striking trope for death in order to cast burlesque itself as a ritualistic agent of reversal. The manuscripts also show that it was not until very late in the game—sometime between April 1929 and the January 1930 publication of The Bridge—that he replaced Astarte with Magdalene. Astarte remains in the version of the poem that appeared in the July 1927 number of The Calendar; in the incomplete manuscript of The Bridge that Crane sent to Otto Kahn in 1928 (Lohf (27) item B1); and in the manuscript that Crane sent to the Black Sun Press in Paris (Lohf (30) item B2.n) over the course of several months in 1929. Crane’s rejection of the pagan goddess may stem from a desire to distance himself from Frazer’s Golden Bough and what he called Eliot’s “useless archaeology” (CPS 218). Quotations from Crane’s manuscripts are published here courtesy of the Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

5. See Allen (243–89), Shteir (156–76), Zeidman (128–43), and Minsky, passim, on reactions to the emergence of the striptease. 6. In 1911, Freud added a note to his discussion of contraries in which he cites Karl Abel’s The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words (1884). He draws particular attention to evidence that “ancient languages” like Egyptian “have only a single word to describe the two contraries at the extreme ends of a series of qualities or activities (e.g. ‘strong-weak,’ ‘oldyoung,’ ‘far-near,’ ‘bind-sever’)” (353). Freud discusses Abel’s work at more length in a 1910 review. See “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,” reprinted in Character and Culture, New York: Collier, 1963, 44–50. The Interpretation of Dreams first appeared in English in A. A. Brill’s 1913 translation. See also Ann Douglas’s account of the impact of Freudian ideas on New York during the 1920s, when it became “the explanatory discourse” (122–55 passim).

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7. See Allen’s account of the 1868–69 season of the Lydia Thompson Troupe, which he argues inaugurates modern American burlesque (119–157). See also Allen’s Chapter Six, “The Institutionalization of Burlesque,” for an analysis of the diminished role of women in the form (157–93). 8. This passage from “The Tunnel” is an example of how Crane’s allusions to homosexuality are legible to readers familiar with the codes of gay culture—in this case, the use of public restrooms in the New York subways as sites of anonymous homosexual encounters—while remaining invisible to others, straight or gay, not in the know. See Dean’s discussions of this reference to the “‘tearoom’ sign of a lighted match, by which gay men make themselves know to each other even today” (90). Dean, however, argues that even though Crane’s poetry includes coded references to homosexuality, it is not governed by the “logic of the closet” (91). See also Chauncey’s discussion of “tearoom encounters” (195–201). 9. See Grossman’s provocative elaboration of this view of Crane’s “intense poetics” (242). 10. This vogue for burlesque is consistent with the “terrible honesty” ethos pervading the 1920s that Ann Douglas examines. See especially her introductory overview of how “all the writing of the urban 1920s is a gloss on the body and the workings of what Freud called ‘the primitive mind’” (44). 11. See Chauncey’s discussion of the burlesque theaters on Fourteenth Street, which became one of the chief centers of gay street life during the 1890s (190–95). See also his examination of the role of burlesque in the pansy craze (301–329). 12. Minsky claims the runway was first used in the United States at his theater. According to Allen, a different theater on Broadway named the “Winter Garden” introduced a runway in 1862 (106). Even so, Minsky’s runway appears to have set the tone for twentieth-century burlesque. 13. See Shteir’s account of the impact of the “hootchy cootch” on American culture (41–48) and how it “embodied fin de siècle anxieties about women’s changing roles” (44). 14. See Allen (225–36) and Shteir (79–113) on the evolution from belly dancing to striptease. Allen addresses the other developments referred to in this paragraph in the chapter “Burlesque in the Twentieth Century” (243–89). Also see Zeidman on the commercial motives behind the Mutual Wheel’s turn to increasingly explicit shows during the 1920s (108–13). 15. Hammett loads his prose with slang of this kind, as in this sample of Spade’s dialogue from The Maltese Falcon (1930), which showcases “cinch”: “A fall-guy is what I asked for, and he’s not a fall-guy unless he’s a cinch to take the fall. Well, to cinch that I’ve got to know what’s what” (189). 16. Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1857, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (1966), tr. Wallace Fowlie (306). In addition to Crane’s ecstatic comments in letters about Rimbaud, see Gorham Munson’s memoir, The Awakening Twenties (1966), in which he singles out the impact of an article on

194

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Notes to Chapter Two Rimbaud in The Dial (June 1920) that he and Crane read with mutual excitement and that quotes from this famous letter to Demeny. See Minsky (73–85) and Allen (248, 251–2) for accounts of the raid and its aftermath. Also see Shteir for a more general treatment of the controversies over obscenity provoked by the emergence of striptease (156–76). For Sumner’s campaign against burlesque, see Allen (249–51) and Minsky, passim, but especially pages 75–85. Also see Chauncey for Sumner’s focus on gay culture (138–9, 146–8, 230–1). See Ian Lumsden’s discussion of homosexuality in pre-Castro Cuba (28– 54), in which he notes that “Havana’s notoriety was similar to that of other port cities such as Marseilles and New Orleans” (35). He also identifies the Parque Central (where Crane met the Cuban sailor mentioned below) as a cruising area that had been well-known since the 1890s (34). In general, Lumsden explains that homophobia was less pronounced in Cuba than in North America, and that Cuban men more readily accepted that “males in certain circumstances could desire other males” (32), without necessarily identifying themselves as homosexual. On Crane’s relationship with Fitzin, see Fisher (281) and O My Land, My Friends (300). A variant of the Sappho limerick appears in Norman Douglas’s Some Limericks (1928; rpt. New York: Grove, 1967). Cowley is “almost certain” that Crane recited these lines “as his own,” and that they were then repeated to Douglas. See Second Flowering (205) and Unterecker (804). The text of another limerick appears in Brown (71) and is reprinted in Unterecker (799): There was a young lady from Thrace, Who attempted her corset to lace Her mother said: “Nelly, There’s more in your belly Than ever came in through your face.” For the text of yet another limerick, titled “For the Memories of a ManEater,” see O My Land, My Friends (317): There once was a cannibal nigger Who ate up his enemy’s frigger; His dozens of wives Had the time of their lives; He grew bigger and Bigger and BIGGER. This limerick, mixing ribaldry with racist stereotypes of sexual prowess, is included in a 1927 letter to Samuel Loveman, one of Crane’s close gay friends. Sending this letter to Philip Horton, Crane’s first biographer, Loveman writes: “See what an evil fellow you’re writing about” (qtd. in O My Land 317).

22. See Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917. Ed. Christopher Ricks. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.

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23. See Brown’s discussion of “Virginia” (110). 24. See, in particular, the discussions of Hammer (172–7), Yingling (209–14), and Martin (137–63). 25. See Chauncey (104–5). 26. See Allen (249–58) for an account of burlesque’s demise. Also see Minsky on the same events (273–81).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Many anthologies gloss “Maquokeeta” as meaning “Big River.” The origin of this explanation is Weber’s 1948 study of Crane, which quotes the following passage from one of Crane’s letters to Waldo Frank: It may interest you to know that the name, Maquokeeta, derives from an amusing source,—and may not be exact—but a beautiful rum-drinking, firewater wassailing friend of mine,—a NY taxi-driver (independant!) who hails from Missouri and is part Indian, has a middle name, Maquokeeta, which he alludes to as meaning ‘big river.’ Some tribal term or other . . . (337) This alternative explanation does not substantively affect my reading of Crane’s anxiety about the name and the ramifications of that anxiety for our understanding of Crane’s primitivism. There are several bases, however, for questioning the authenticity of this letter, for which no date is provided. First of all, Weber chose to exclude the letter from his 1952 collection of the correspondence, perhaps because he himself was unable to determine whether it was genuine. After all, why else would he omit a letter that seems to explain the significance of an obscure element of The Bridge? Weber himself seizes on this evidence in order to defend Crane’s poem against New Critical attacks on its supposed “lack of unity.” If Maquokeeta means “Big River,” one may argue that the name “refers back to the symbol of the river in “the River”; just as the river became a serpent in the last stanza, so does Maquokeeta become a serpent” (337). Another reason for skepticism is the fact that Crane never mentions this explanation for the name to Yvor Winters, with whom he exchanges a number of letters about the name, as I detail below. Since Crane specifically asked Winters to help him find more information about the name, it is puzzling that he would not have asked him to verify whether or not it meant “Big River.”

2. See Barkan and Bush (23–41), where in the course of making his case for a re-evaluation of modernist primitivism, Bush contrasts “the equivocation of The Waste Land’s attitude toward myth and ritual” with what he terms “the truly nostalgic primitivism of, for example, Hart Crane’s The Bridge” (41). 3. I adopt the phrase “modernist primitivism” from William Rubin’s discussion of how “primitive” and “primitivism” became terms of approbation among Western artists during the early years of the twentieth century (2–7). However, I do not subscribe to Rubin’s argument regarding the “affinity” between modern art and tribal artifacts, nor do I wish to suggest that such

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

an affinity exists between Crane’s poetry and Native American literature. See Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture for a persuasive critique of Rubin’s position and the MOMA exhibition, which endeavors above all to tell a heroic story of the origins of modernism, limiting itself to modernist primitivism and neglecting to examine the indigenous cultures that are the source of the artifacts so admired by the modernists (189–214). The recent critical history of “The Dance” is instructive. In the 1960s and 70s, work inflected by myth criticism gave much attention to the section. Lewis, for instance, views it as perhaps the crucial juncture in The Bridge in which “we have been swept out of time into the time-conquering world of myth” (306) where “the long-sought-after vision is at last experienced” (307). Paul takes a similar approach, calling the section a representation of a “mythic world” that is “the sacred center, the source of life—and poetry” (216). Recently, however, Crane’s readers have grown uncomfortable with the cliches of primitivism on display in the poem. Pritchard, for instance, calls Crane’s “thematic insistence” on such issues as the relationship between Anglo-Americans and Indians “the least attractive and the corniest aspect of The Bridge” (253–4). Indeed, none of the recent book-length studies of Crane give any sustained attention to “The Dance,” despite the fact that Crane considered it a crucial part of the poem. Edelman (213, 255, 257) and Hammer (123, 177) make only passing references to the section, while Yingling’s analysis occupies less than two pages (219–20). See Christopher Steiner (211–25) for the history of visual representations of dancing as a motif of primitivism that dates back to at least the sixteenth century. There has been surprisingly little work done on Crane’s “sources” for this imagery of eagles and serpents. In a footnote, Edelman notes that “the eagle carrying the serpent is an image of the triumph of time over space that derives” from both Shelley and Nietzsche (254). Poetry, Oct. 1918, p. 44. On Henderson, see Carr (225–6) and Castro (25– 27). See Castro on this debate (43–5) and on The Path on the Rainbow generally (19–34 passim). In The Voice in the Margin, Krupat (110–5) also discuss the significance of this anthology in the evolution of perceptions of the Indian and in the history of Native American literatures. I quote from “Our Mother Pocahontas” as it first appeared in Poetry (July, 1917, p. 170) only five months after the magazine’s special Indian issue that I discuss below. See Tilton and Young on the way American views of Rolfe’s role in the Pocahontas story changed over time. On the belief in primitive promiscuity, see Stocking’s discussion of Victorian theories of the evolution of marriage (Victorian 197–208). This transition from evolutionism to relativism is often associated with the landmark 1898 Torres Straits expedition and, in general, with Franz Boas’s

Notes to Chapter Three

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

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commitment to the analysis of particular cultures in terms of their own characteristics. On the significance of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, see Kuklick (132–149), who terms it a “watershed” because it helped institutionalize the primacy of fieldwork, promoting the “fusion of the previously separable tasks of theorist and data collector” (139). On Boas, see Stocking (Race 195–234). Crane mentions reading The Golden Bough in a November 23, 1923 letter to Jean Toomer (169). See Clifford’s discussion of the links between the salvage paradigm of ethnography and pastoralism. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s The Country and The City (1973), Clifford terms pastoral “a conventionalized pattern of retrospection that laments the loss of a ‘good’ country” in which “the ultimate referent is . . . Eden” (“Ethnographic” 113). See Herbert (60–7). This ubiquitous topos of primitivism ranges from Amerigo Vespucci’s famous 1503 letter entitled Mundus Novus, which dwells at length on the “excessive lust” of Brazilian Indians, to Malinowski’s sexual fantasies revealed in his posthumously published diaries. In addition to Herbert, see Berkhofer (8–10) and Torgovnick (227–243). The best overview of totemism is Lévi-Strauss’s Totemism. Also see Kuper (76–122). On Eliot’s view of ritual and its importance to his poetic, see Manganaro (68–110), Skaff (67–72, 79–105), and Gray (108–42). In the course of his argument that “nativist modernism” redefined the idea of national identity during the 1920s, Michaels turns to The Bridge as an example of a “failed” nativist “strategy for insisting upon a racebased model of identity” (13). Viewing homosexuality as an “emblem of the nonreproductive family,” Michaels asserts that The Bridge “deploys homosexuality on behalf of nativism and, in so doing, legitimates the homosexual as the figure for a purified American identity.” If, he continues, “the purely American family must be the nonreproductive family, and if the nonreproductive family is the homosexual family, then the purest American is the homosexual.” In Michaels’s view, “homosexual desire is identified in The Bridge as desire for Indians.” The “Indiana” section in fact “makes that identification literal: sleeping with Indians is imagined as a way of being an Indian” (49). “The Streets” appears in The Bare Hills (1927), which Crane read in manuscript in November 1926, ten months before writing the letter to Kahn. See Crane’s November 28, 1926 letter to Winters (291) in which Crane quotes these very same words back to Winters. On Austin, see Carr (218–28) and Krupat, “On the Translation of Native American Song and Story” (11–15). See also Paul G. Zolbrod on the complexities of Navajo poetry and Willard Gingerich on ambiguity in Nahuatl poetry, both in Swann.

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19. On Crashing Thunder and Black Elk Speaks see Krupat’s For Those Who Come After, chapters four and five respectively. Among other discrepancies between Black Elk’s spoken narrative and its textualization, Neihardt has conceded that “[t]he beginning and ending are mine; they are what [Black Elk] would have said had he been able” (qtd. in Castro 87). Krupat draws attention to the passage Neihardt invented for the close of the book, which reads, in part: “[Y]ou see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead” (270). In Krupat’s view, Neihardt’s decision to conclude with such an articulation of tragic hopelessness about the future of Lakota culture is a particularly egregious distortion that perpetuates the myth of the Indian as a “vanishing race.” 20. “War-Paint and Feathers” first appeared in the October 17, 1919 number of The Athenaeum, while “Tradition and the Individual Talent” first appeared in The Egoist in two installments, first in September and then in December 1919. 21. It remains unclear whether Crane took the Strachey text from William Carlos Williams’s In The American Grain (1925) or Kay Boyle’s review of this book in transition (April 1927). See Berthoff (122) and Paul (198–9). On Strachey’s transcriptions of Powhatan songs, see Swann (xiv-xv). 22. In the course of his powerful reading of The Bridge as “an epic representation of the search for American origins,” John Irwin, for instance, alludes to “The Dance” as “a phantasized journey by its speaker back in time to the pre-Columbian world of the Indians to observe a primal scene of origin” (270). Lewis and Paul characterize “The Dance” in a manner that elevates the “mythic” dimension of Crane’s poetic fiction, overlooking the tension between the “primitive” depicted and Crane’s manipulation of the subjective consciousness that perceives the primitive. Paul simply accepts the premise of primitivism that “to reach the pure Indian world is to come to the sacred center, the source of life—and poetry” (216). And in his reading, Lewis views the sacrifice of Maquokeeta as “the supreme visionary act” in which “the long-sought-after vision is at last experienced” (307). Although Crane explicitly refers to “The Dance” as the “anti-climax” (429) of The Bridge, Lewis treats it as its climax, asserting that in this section Crane “has found his myth to god; the union is complete” (316). 23. Crane learned the gotzotsky from Stanislaw Portapovitch, the dancer in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes whom Crane celebrates in his early poem “To Portapovitch” (147). See Unterecker (92–3). 24. See Berthoff (75–6) for a concise resume of the composition history of “Voyages.” 25. See Lohf (312). This volume is in the Hart Crane Collection, Columbia University Libraries. It is inscribed, in Crane’s hand, “Hart Crane / ’26.”

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26. See Edelman’s suggestive Bloomian reading of this passage, in which he asserts that in the “wrestling” with a paternal figure, Crane has inscribed a struggle with Whitman (214). 27. Crane makes this remark in his prose statement of his poetics, “General Aims and Theories.” Crane also makes negative associations between Eliot and archaeology in a 1926 letter commenting on “The Hollow Men” (231). See Edelman’s illuminating exposition of how Crane contrasts his affirmative poetics of “architecture” with Eliot’s “aesthetics of despair,” which Crane terms a poetics of “archaeology” (28–31). 28. In a study concerned with the relation between Crane’s sexuality and his poetics, it is strange that Yingling devotes less than two pages to “The Dance” (119–120), the section that provides, as he himself writes, the “one moment of ecstatic sexual union” (119) in The Bridge. Yingling reads Maquokeeta as “a representative of the berdaches of Native American culture whose power is both coded as and derived from their transgression of gender systems”(119). 29. On the homosexual cult of St. Sebastian, see Richard Kaye, Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination (1997). Christopher Ricks’s discussion of Eliot’s “Love Song of St. Sebastian,” in Inventions of the March Hare (267–73), is also illuminating on this question. See Ellmann (71) on Wilde’s viewing of Guido Reni’s painting. Ellmann also mentions that Wilde adopted Sebastian as his alias while in France (71).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. See Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, the classic study of American pastoralism. The thesis of Marx’s book is that American writers, artists, and intellectuals have tended to invert the triumphal attitude of American culture toward technological progress. In a 1986 essay revisiting his seminal work, Marx explains that in what he calls “official” public discourse, the “representative event” of a machine intruding upon a landscape was most often described in a manner that reflected “an exhilarating, extravagantly optimistic conception of history as a record of steady, cumulative, and . . . preordained expansion of human knowledge and power. . . . The transition to industrialism was enthusiastically endorsed as the stage of history when the direction of change, finally, unmistakably acquired the character of continuous predictable progress. As described by the dissident intellectual minority, however, the same event evoked feelings of dislocation, anxiety, alienation, and foreboding” (37). 2. See Steinman (especially 1–13, 57–77) on the impact of Einstein’s theories and modern science in general on poetic modernism. 3. See Crane’s March 5, 1926 letter to Gorham Munson (230). In a 1928 letter, he also names Whitehead among a list of such writers as Spengler

200

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

and Wyndham Lewis “who keep drumming up new encyclopedias of the Future” (LHC 322). Several variants of the opening lines may be found among the extensive and heavily marked-up manuscripts of “Cape Hatteras” dated “c. 1927,” including this version: “Imponderable the dinosaur who / sinks slow / the mammoth / corpse / the cape . . .” All references to Crane’s manuscripts are to the Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. See Tashjian (116–42) on Munson’s role in the controversies of the New York avant-garde. Munson’s phrase, “skyscraper primitives,” from which Tashjian takes his title, first appears in a 1925 issue of the Guardian (Tashjian 132). Tashjian also provides a useful overview of the machine cult in the arts. The following recapitulation of the concept of the sublime is based on the overviews provided by Weiskel (especially Chapters 1 and 2) and Nye (1– 43). See Armstrong’s provocative discussion of how medical, psychological, and social theory may be linked to reconceptions of the body within literary texts. See especially his introduction (1–11) and chapter on what he calls “prosthetic modernism” (77–105). See Winters’s review of The Bridge, in which he asserts that Crane’s poem “demonstrate[s] the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration” (“Progress” 31). Tate’s review was not quite as damning as Winters’s, but he too judged the homage to Whitman as a bad “lapse” into sentimentality (315). See Trachtenberg on Evans’s photographs and their role in The Bridge (Brooklyn 185–93). Of the recent book-length studies of Crane, only Edelman (222–3) makes a passing reference to Crane’s early plans for the section. More than any other recent work of criticism, Delany’s refreshing essay, “Atlantis Rose . . . Some Notes on Hart Crane,” devotes attention to the origins of the poem, reproducing and discussing several of the early outlines first published in Weber (219–22). On Lindbergh and the American romance with “airmindedness,” see Ann Douglas (434–61). Although “Cape Hatteras” is not ordinarily thought of as an elegy, Schenck argues that “a highly conventional pattern of [pastoral elegy] imagery informs its structure and clarifies its procedures.” In Schenck’s view, the latter part of the poem “reproduce[s] the formal conventions of the classical funeral elegy” (5–6). The synopsis is among the “Cape Hatteras” manuscripts in the Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. This is probably the same text that Crane refers to as the “rough synopsis” he encloses with his September 12, 1927 letter to Otto Kahn (347). The text

Notes to Chapter Four

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

201

is also partially reproduced in Weber (260). All the quotations which follow are taken directly from the manuscript. Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. See Nye’s discussion (109–42) of the changing designs and technologies of the factory in the United States. According to Nye, in 1900, less than four per cent of all factory power was electrical, but by 1919 the figure exceeded fifty percent (134). Also see Nye on the River Rouge plant (131–2). On Sheeler’s work related to the River Rouge Plant and American Precisionism in general, see Haskell (American 145–65). On Demuth’s My Egypt, see Haskell (Demuth 193–8). See Unterecker (166) and Fisher (116) for Crane’s experiences at his father’s factory. For the munitions factory, see Unterecker (113) and Fisher (69). The dynamo passage is probably the most often quoted (though rarely analyzed) part of “Cape Hatteras,” usually in order to illustrate the supposed decline in Crane’s poetry at this late stage in the writing of The Bridge. The stanza has been denigrated as “ridiculous huffing and puffing” (Liebowitz 264), “flashy and empty” rhetoric (Horton 263), and “marked by haste and expressive forcing” (Berthoff 105). Even R. W. B. Lewis, who considers “Cape Hatteras” as a whole to be a “masterpiece” (323), views this stanza as “a very deliberate and conscious self-parody” (331; emphasis in original). Lewis’s reading of the dynamo passage as self-parody, depends, however, on his assumption that “Cape Hatteras” is a jeremiad against “the apocalyptic horror of contemporary America” (325) as manifested by technological progress. As argued above, although Crane was wary of unrestrained enthusiasm for the machine, he was by no means a foe of technological progress. On the neglected figure Bob Brown (1886–1959), see McGann (84–97), who calls him “the most important modernist practitioner and theorist” of “optical poetry” (84). Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Lewis, for instance, characterizes the second line of the couplet as a futile effort to rebound from the first line: “by recompense, as a revenge against reality, man has recourse to sheer blind action and imagines himself as a pure machine hurtling through space” (328). Paul also fails to discriminate between the two lines, calling them both images of “the annihilation of the self ” (234). See Rabinbach’s fascinating examination of the “human motor” as a trope for productive forces during the nineteenth century. He addresses the development of the body-machine analogy throughout his book, but see pages 51–68 in particular. Hart Crane Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

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Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Rpt. 1986. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982. Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Wilson, Edmund. The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952; Rpt. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985. Winters, Yvor. The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920–28. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1966. ———. “The Indian in English,” Transition XI no. 4 (1928). Rpt. in Yvor Winters: Uncollected Essays and Reviews. Ed. Francis Murphy. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1973: 35–43. ———. In Defense of Reason. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1947; Rpt. 1987. ———. “Open Letter to the Editors of This Quarter,” This Quarter. Fall 1926. Rpt. in Uncollected Essays: 32–4. ———. “The Progress of Hart Crane.” Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982: 23–31. Woods, Gregory. Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Yingling, Thomas E. Hart Crane and The Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Young, Philip. “The Mother of Us All: Pocahontas Reconsidered.” Kenyon Review. Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer 1962): 391–415. Zeidman, Irving. The American Burlesque Show. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

Index

A Abel, Karl, 192n. 6 Aiken, Conrad, 140 “Alastor” (Shelley), 103 Aldington, Richard, 42 Allen, Robert C., 74, 78, 85, 91, 95–96, 192n. 5, 193nn. 7, 12, 14, 194nn. 17, 18, 195n. 26 “Among School Children” (Yeats), 130 Anderson, Margaret, 187n. 15 Anderson, Sherwood, 54, 121 Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski), 7, 115 Aristophanes, 64, 191n. 40 Armstrong, Tim, 5, 159, 176, 200n. 7 Arnold, Matthew, 94 Athenaeum, 107, 186n. 11, 198n. 20 Austin, Mary, 116, 120, 121, 197n. 18

B Bagehot, Walter, 126 Baker, Houston, 183n.3 Baker, Josephine, 4, 7, 189n. 35 Barkan, Elazar, 195n. 2 Barnes, Djuna, 189n. 35 Barrymore, John, 7, 189n. 35 Barthes, Roland, 16–17 Bastian, Adolph, 110 Bataille, Georges, 36, 37, 66, 97 Baudelaire, Charles, 189n. 31 Baum, L. Frank 144 Beals, Carlton, 143 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 94

Benchley, Robert, 69 Bennett, Arnold, 169–170 Bennett, Tony, 36, 187n. 19 Bergonzi, Bernard, 23, 186n. 11, 190n. 36 Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr., 197n. 13 Bernhardt, Sarah, 189n. 35 Berthoff, Warner, 198nn. 21, 24, 201n. 18 Berlin, Irving, 78 Black Elk Speaks, 7, 117–118, 198n. 19; see also Neihardt, John G. Blackmur, R. P., 20, 190n. 38 Bland, Lucy, 190n. 37 Bloch, Ernst, 186n. 12 Boas, Franz, 116, 117, 120, 196n. 10 Boyle, Kay, 198n. 21 Brinton, Daniel, 120 Brooks, Peter, 5–6, 130, 185n. 3 Broom, 29, 187n. 15 Brown, Bob, 171, 201n. 19 Brown, Slater, 80, 87 Brown, Susan Jenkins, 77, 87, 194n. 21, 195n. 23 Brunner, Edward J., 184n. 1, 185n. 2, 186n. 14, 189n. 32, 191n. 1 Bürger, Peter, 4 Burke, Kenneth, 106 Burlin, Natalie Curtis, 116 Burne, Glenn S., 190n. 36 Bush, Ronald, 102, 195n. 2 Butler, Judith, 6

C Caesar, Irving, 93

213

214 Cameron, Sharon, 40 “Canonization, The” (Donne), 49 Carr, Helen, 196n. 6, 197n. 18 Castro, Michael, 117, 196nn. 6, 7, 198n. 19 Cézanne, Paul, 75 Chandler, Raymond, 183n. 2 Chase, Stuart, 143 Chauncey, George, 2, 30, 31, 79, 88, 193nn. 8, 11, 194n. 18, 195n. 25 Chinitz, David E., 4 Clifford, James, 23, 83, 104, 110, 111, 118, 186n. 9, 196n. 3, 197n. 12 Cobb, Irvin S., 69 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 133–134 Comstock, Anthony, 88 Cooper, James Fenimore, 10, 146 Cortez, Hernán, 108 Cowley, Malcolm, 59, 92, 194n. 21 Crane, Clarence Arthur, 161 Crane, Grace, 39, 89 Crane, Hart: animality, 5, 6–7, 9, 52, 53–60, 65–67, 72–74, 87, 90, 92, 111–113, 136, 148, 152–153, 155, 170–171, 180; see also bestiaries; body; eroticism; sexology; totemism anthropology, 10, 23–24, 102–103, 108, 112–114, 115, 118, 123, 131, 196n. 10; see also cultural relativism; culture concept; ethnography; participant observation; primitivism; totemism aviation, 161, 162, 174–175, 177; see also technological sublime; technology bestiaries, 9, 50, 53, 65–66, 73, 155; see also animality body, 2, 9–10, 90–92, 112, 124–125, 136–137; see also animality; eroticism; obscenity; prosthesis; purity authenticity of, 3, 5, 10, 37, 67 corporeal poetics, 5–7, 59–62, 185n. 3 cultural construction, 6–7, 18 divided from mind, 5–6, 38, 40

Index margins, 66–67 perceptual capacities, 152, 172–173, 177 technology and, 10–11, 166–167, 173–176, 180–181 burlesque, 8, 9–10, 30, 69–99; see also eroticism; Minsky, Morton; “National Winter Garden”; popular culture; Ziegfeld, Florenz authenticity, 75–76, 79 censorship, 95–96 entrances and exits, 81–83, 85, 87 gay milieu, 79–80, 89, 98, 99 Havana, 80, 87–88, 89–90 modernism, 75–77 obscenity, 70, 74, 87–88 striptease, 74–75, 81 trapeze, 96–97 veiling of body, 89–92 catachresis, 5, 8, 9, 20, 63, 79, 116, 136, 176, 189n. 27; see also poetics of difficulty covenant, 49–50, 136–137, 158, 174, 179–180 cultural relativism, 108, 131, 196n. 10; see also anthropology; culture concept; ethnography; participant observation culture concept, 112, 115, 126, 131–132; see also anthropology; cultural relativism; ethnography; participant observation; primitivism; totemism dance, 1–4, 7, 81, 94, 98, 103, 130–131; see also Duncan, Isadora; popular culture desire, 28, 63, 72, 83, 126, 131–138; see also animality; bestiaries; body; eroticism Elizabethan poetry, 19, 49, 97, 190n. 39 eroticism, 9, 17, 18–19, 36–39, 43–44, 49–53, 61, 63–67, 71–73, 78– 79, 97–98, 126, 133, 155; see also animality; bestiaries; body; burlesque; desire ethnography, 5, 10, 23, 102, 103–105, 106, 108–111, 114–116, 118,

Index 119, 121, 131, 133, 137–138; see also anthropology; cultural relativism; culture concept; participant observation; primitivism; totemism homosexuality, 2, 5, 8, 10, 31, 35–40, 59, 79, 93, 94–95, 98, 139– 142, 162, 186n. 14, 187n. 18, 188nn. 21, 23, 193n. 8, 194n. 19, 197n. 16; see also sexology Imagism, 42–43, 188n. 24, 189n. 25 intoxication, 17, 60–62, 65, 67, 86–87, 177 jazz, 4, 76, 80–81, 91, 93; see also popular culture limericks, 92–93, 194n. 21; see also obscenity Mexico, 108–109, 142–146 modernism, 3–5, 6, 7, 23–24, 28, 29, 54, 75, 76–77, 102, 118, 171, 183nn. 2, 3, 187nn. 15, 18, 189n. 25, 195n. 3; see also modernity; poetics of difficulty modernity, 5, 11, 21, 23, 153, 159, 167, 170, 174, 177–178, 180; see also modernism; science; technological sublime; technology Native Americans, 5, 10, 23, 101–111, 114–129, 132–133, 137–138, 139, 140, 142–148; see also “The Dance” obscenity, 2, 5, 10, 29, 70, 74, 87–88, 91–92, 187n. 15, 194n. 17; see also burlesque; limericks; “National Winter Garden”; “Possessions” participant observation, 10, 82–83, 84, 104, 108, 145; see also anthropology; ethnography; cultural relativism; culture concept poetics of difficulty, 9, 15, 18–23, 25, 29, 62, 79, 94, 162, 171, 187n. 14; see also catachresis; modernism popular culture, 4–5, 9–10, 70, 74–76, 78, 93–94; see also burlesque; dance; jazz

215 primitive promiscuity myth, 10, 108, 112, 126, 131, 139, 141–142, 196n. 9; see also culture concept; primitivism primitivism, 10, 23–24, 25, 79, 102, 114, 122–124, 126–128, 135– 136, 137, 138–139, 195n. 3, 197n. 13; see also anthropology; cultural relativism; culture concept; ethnography; totemism prosthesis, 175–177, 200n. 7; see also technology purity, 13, 14–15, 46, 180 dialectical relationship with defilement, 9, 17–18, 20, 24–28, 32– 33, 34, 38–39, 40–41, 51–52, 53, 57, 67, 73–74, 79, 97 poetics of, 15–18, 44, 79 purification rituals, 24–25, 73, 97 language and, 17–18, 21, 47–48, 49 science, 150–151, 156, 159, 161, 174, 178–179, 199n. 2; see also modernity; technological sublime; technology sexology, 5, 9, 54–59, 84–85, 88, 141, 155, 190n. 37; see also animality; body; Gourmont, Remy de; homosexuality technological sublime, 5, 11, 152, 155– 158, 167, 177–178, 180; see also modernity; prosthesis; science; technology technology, 10–11, 16, 149–156, 158– 159, 160–161, 166–181; see also modernity; prosthesis; science; technological sublime totemism, 104, 113–114, 134–135, 139, 144, 197n. 14; see also anthropology; ethnography; cultural relativism; culture concept; primitivism Crane, Hart, works: “Atlantis,” 9, 20, 42, 43, 79, 98, 119, 139, 158–159, 180, 184n. 1, 187n. 14, 191nn. 40, 4 “Ave Maria,” 184n. 1 “Belle Isle,” 43–44, 189n. 26

216 Bridge, The, 7, 8, 9–10, 13, 14, 23, 43, 53, 69–70, 71–72, 78–79, 87, 92, 95, 98–99, 101–102, 105, 108, 112, 114, 118, 119, 126, 131, 136, 139, 141, 143, 147, 149, 152, 158, 159, 160, 167– 168, 175, 180, 184n. 1, 189n. 29, 192n. 4, 195n. 2, 196n. 3, 197n. 16, 198n. 22, 199n. 28 “Broken Tower, The,” 8, 13–14, 16, 189n. 29 “Cape Hatteras,” 9, 11, 16, 126, 149–181, 191n. 4, 200n. 12, 201n. 18 composition process, 160–161, 165– 166, 173, 178, 200nn. 4, 13 “Carmen de Boheme,” 185n. 4 “Circumstance, The,” 108 “Cutty Sark,” 141, 160, 180–181, 184n. 1 “Dance, The,” 9, 10, 71, 72, 90, 98, 101–106, 108–117, 118, 119–120, 124–131, 132–142, 143, 145–146, 184n.1, 189n. 29, 190n. 39, 196n. 3, 198n. 22, 199n. 28 Maquokeeta, naming of, 101, 105– 106, 107–108, 195n. 1 “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” 4, 93, 190n. 39 “General Aims and Theories,” 15, 41, 42–43, 185n. 2, 199n. 27 “Harbor Dawn, The,” 141, 184n. 1 “Indiana,” 160, 197n. 16 Key West, 189n. 29 “Lachrymae Christi,” 13, 53, 134 “Legend,” 13, 61 “Modern Craft,” 185n. 4 “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” 8, 22–23 “Naiad of Memory,” 186n. 8 “National Winter Garden,” 8, 9–10, 17, 69–74, 77, 79–80, 81–87, 89–94, 96–99, 112, 189n. 29, 191nn. 1, 3 revisions of, 74, 191n. 4 “O Carib Isle!,” 120

Index “Passage,” 53 “Possessions,” 6, 9, 13, 17, 26, 27, 28– 35, 37–38, 40–41, 50, 52, 58 deletion of anal intercourse from, 29–31, 88, 186n. 14 “Powhatan’s Daughter,” 105, 106, 127 “Praise for an Urn,” 190n. 39 “Quaker Hill,” 98, 160 “Recitative,” 53, 155 “Repose of Rivers,” 15–16, 44, 53 “River, The,” 72, 93, 109, 162, 167, 184n. 1, 189n. 29 “Sad Indian, The,” 108 “Southern Cross,” 71–72, 89 “This Way Where November Takes the Leaf,” 37–38, 187n. 20 “Three Songs,” 70, 71–72, 184n. 1 “To Brooklyn Bridge,” 28, 72, 184n. 1, 189n. 29 “To Emily Dickinson,” 16 “To Portapovitch,” 198n. 23 “Tunnel, The,” 79, 138, 184n. 1, 193n. 8 “Van Winkle,” 184n. 1 “Virginia,” 71–72, 93, 195n. 23 “Voyages,” 6, 9, 13, 17, 26, 27, 28, 40–53, 58, 132, 141, 185n. 2, 189nn. 25, 30, 198n. 24 “Voyages I,” 52 “Voyages II,” 28, 44, 52, 132 “Voyages III,” 17, 50–52 “Voyages IV,” 17, 19–20, 52, 65 “Voyages V,” 52–53, 132 “Voyages VI,” 17–18, 28, 41–42, 43–50, 53, 189n. 28 White Buildings, 6, 9, 22, 29, 44, 47–48, 79, 185n. 2, 189n. 29 “Wine Menagerie, The,” 6, 9, 14, 17, 18–19, 26–28, 37, 43, 44, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53–54, 57–67, 72, 87, 155, 190n. 38, 191n. 3 Crashaw, Richard, 49, 189n. 34 Crashing Thunder, The Autobiography of an American Indian (Radin), 117–118, 198n. 19 Crosby, Caresse, 160 Crowinshield, Frank, 69 cummings, e.e., 75–77, 78, 89, 171

Index Curtin, Jeremiah, 119

D Dalhousie Review, 121 Daly, Ann, 1, 2, 3, 4 Davie, Donald, 190n. 36 Dean, Tim, 8, 36, 187n. 14, 193n. 8 Decline of the West (Spengler), 111, 163 DeKoven, Marianne, 184n.3 Delacroix, Eugène, 1 Delany, Samuel R., 8, 140–141, 200n. 10 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 118 Demuth, Charles, 11, 161, 167, 201n. 16 Densmore, Frances, 107, 116, 119, 120 Descartes, René, 5 Diaghilev, Sergei, 198n. 23 Dial, 75, 107, 121, 191n. 2, 194n. 16 Doan, Laura, 190n. 37 Donne, John, 49 Dos Passos, John, 69 Douglas, Ann, 3, 7, 25, 53, 161, 183n. 2, 189n. 35, 192n. 6, 193n. 10, 200n. 11 Douglas, Mary, 9, 13, 24–26, 28, 47–48, 52, 67, 79 Douglas, Norman, 194n. 21 Duchamp, Marcel, 161 Duncan, Isadora, 1–4, 7, 54, 94, 98 Duncan, Robert, 188n. 23 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 184n. 3 Durkheim, Émile, 103, 113, 134

E Edelman, Lee, 8, 19, 20, 44, 45, 136, 158, 178, 179, 185n. 5, 186n. 8, 189n. 27, 190n. 38, 191n. 1, 196nn. 3, 5, 199nn. 26, 27, 200n. 10 Egoist, 23, 56, 186n. 10, 198n. 20 Einstein, Albert, 150, 199n. 2 Eliot, T. S., 4, 9, 23, 54, 55, 56, 58, 93, 98, 107, 113–114, 120–121, 122– 124, 139, 140, 146, 186nn. 7, 10, 11, 190n. 36, 192n. 4, 197n. 15, 199n. 27 “Gerontion,” 189n. 31 “Hollow Men, The,” 199n. 27

217 “King Bolo” verses, 93 “Love Song of St. Sebastian, The,” 140, 199n. 29 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 123, 198n. 20 “War-Paint and Feathers,” 107, 120– 121, 123, 198n. 20 Waste Land, The, 23, 195n. 2 Ellis, Havelock, 54, 56 Ellmann, Richard, 199n. 29 “Epithalamion” (Crashaw), 49, 189n. 34 Erskine, John, 69 Esenin, Sergei, 1 Espey, John, 190n. 36 Evans, Walker, 160, 168, 200n. 9

F Felski, Rita, 184n. 3 Fisher, Clive, 8, 35, 143, 188n. 20, 194n. 20, 201n. 17 Fitzin, Jack, 88–89, 194n. 20 Fletcher, John Gould, 107 Foucault, Michel, 6–8, 29, 36, 37, 187n. 16 Frank, Waldo, 38, 87, 89, 142, 195n. 1 Our America, 110 Virgin Spain, 146 Frazer, James G., 23, 24, 25, 108, 113, 123, 139, 186n. 11, 192n. 4 Freeman, 107 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 54, 58, 77, 113, 135, 137, 149, 175–176, 192n. 6, 193n. 10 Civilization and its Discontents, 149, 175–176 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 135 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 77 Totem and Taboo, 113, 135 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 184n. 3 Fuller, Loië, 130

G Gardner, Jared, 114 Gelpi, Albert, 159, 189n. 25 Gilbert, Sandra, 183n. 3 Giles, Paul, 74, 86, 191n. 1 Glass, Loren, 187n. 15

218 Goldberg, Jonathan, 187n. 16 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 23, 24, 108, 113, 192n. 4, 197n. 11 Gourmont, Remy de, 1, 9, 53–59, 63, 66, 155, 189n. 36 Natural Philosophy of Love, The (Physique de l’amour), 53–59, 155 Virgin Heart, A (Un coeur virginal), 54, 55–57 Graham, Martha, 3, 189n. 35 Gray, Piers, 197n. 15 Greenblatt, Stephen, 8 Grossman, Allen, 20, 25, 27, 48, 193n. 9 Gubar, Susan, 183n. 3

H Hammer, Langdon, 8, 35, 112, 183n. 1, 185n. 1, 186n. 14, 187nn. 15, 18, 188n. 22, 190n. 38, 191n. 1, 195n. 24, 196n. 3 Hammett, Dashiell, 82, 193n. 15 Hartman, Geoffrey, 21–22, 35, 42, 60, 136 Haskell, Barbara, 161, 167, 201n. 16 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 40, 148 H.D., 42, 119 Hegel, G. W. F., 37 Hellinger, Mark, 69 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 106–107, 120, 196n. 6 Herbert, Christopher, 102, 112, 126, 131–132, 197n. 13 Hollander, John, 46 Homer, 123 Horton, Philip, 191n. 40, 194n. 21, 201n. 18 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 147 Huxley, Aldous, 54 Huyssen, Andreas, 4, 158–159, 184n. 3

I Irwin, John, 198n. 22

J James, William, 13, 26, 28 Jonson, Ben, 34 Joyce, James, 29, 54, 88, 95, 187n. 15

Index K Kahn, Albert, 167 Kahn, Otto, 105, 106, 110, 112, 114, 115, 153, 160, 192n. 4, 197n. 17, 200n. 13 Kant, Immanuel, 156 Keats, John, 140 Kenner, Hugh, 42, 189n. 24 Kermode, Frank, 42, 44 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 54, 141 Krazy Kat, 78 Kroeber, Alfred, 109 Krupat, Arnold, 117, 196n. 7, 197n. 18, 198n. 19 Kuklick, Henrika, 137, 197n. 10 Kuper, Adam, 113, 197n. 14

L Lacan, Jacques, 185n. 3 Laforgue, Jules, 186n. 12 La Guardia, Fiorello H., 95 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 119 Lawrence, D. H., 146 Le Bon, Gustave, 135 Leibowitz, Herbert A., 189n. 29, 201n. 18 Leonardo da Vinci, 142 Levenson, Michael, 123 Levine, Lawrence, 94 Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 114, 197n. 14 Lewis, R. W. B., 19–20, 28, 71, 114, 159–160, 189nn. 31, 32, 191n. 40, 196n. 3, 198n. 22, 201nn. 18, 21 Lewis, Wyndham, 55, 200n. 3 Lindbergh, Charles, 161, 200n. 11 Lindsay, Vachel, 105, 107 “Lines Written in the Manner of Spencer” (Coleridge), 134 Little Review, 23, 29, 30, 33, 56, 88, 161, 187nn. 14, 15 Lohf, Kenneth A., 192n. 4, 198n. 25 London, Jack, 7 Longenbach, James, 186n. 10 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 10, 146 Longinus, 156 Loveman, Samuel, 57, 194n. 21 Lowell, Amy, 188n. 24

Index Lumsden, Ian, 194n. 19 “Lycidas” (Milton), 164

M Malinowski, Bronislaw, 7, 115, 131, 197n. 13 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 21, 130 Manganaro, Marc, 113, 118, 197n. 15 Marett, R. R., 137 Mariani, Paul, 8, 35 Marin, John, 167 Marlowe, Christopher, 190n. 39 Martin, Robert K., 8, 28, 35, 36, 140, 184n. 4, 185n. 4, 186n. 14, 188n. 21, 191n. 1, 195n. 24 Marx, Leo, 180, 199n. 1 Matthews, Washington, 119 McGann, Jerome, 201n. 19 McLennan, John F., 113 Mead, Margaret, 7 Melville, Herman, 40, 188n. 23 Michaels, Walter Benn, 114, 197n. 16 Minsky, Abe, 91, 96 Minsky, Herbert, 90 Minsky, Morton, 10, 69–71, 74, 81, 86, 90–91, 96, 97–98, 192n. 4, 193n. 12, 194nn. 17, 18, 195n. 26 Mitchell, W. J. T., 41–42 Momaday, N. Scott, 147 Monroe, Harriet, 106, 191n. 2 Montezuma, 108 Mooney, James, 120 Moore, Marianne, 7, 189n. 35, 191n. 2 Morgan, Helen, 189n. 35 Munson, Gorham, 54, 153, 161, 185n. 2, 193n. 16, 199n. 3, 200n. 5

N Nast, Condé, 69 Nathan, George Jean, 69 Nation, 107 Neihardt, John G., 116, 117–118, 198n. 19; see also Black Elk Speaks Nelson, Ernst, 190n. 39 New, Elisa, 186n. 13 Nicholls, Peter, 184n. 3

219 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 104, 196n. 5 North, Michael, 184n. 3 Nye, David, 157, 169, 200n. 6, 201n. 15

O O’Neill, Eugene, 7, 185n. 2, 189n. 35 Opffer, Emil, 38 “Our Mother Pocahontas” (Lindsay), 105, 107 Owens, Louis, 101, 147, 148

P Path on the Rainbow, The, 107, 120–121, 122–124, 196n. 7 Paul, Sherman, 28, 71, 159, 189nn. 28, 31, 32, 196n. 3, 198nn. 21, 22, 201n. 21 Petrushka (Stravinsky), 27, 186n. 12 “Phoenix and the Turtle, The” (Shakespeare), 49 Plato, 64, 191n. 40 Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence), 146 Pocahontas, 71, 103, 105, 107–108, 111, 112, 126, 127, 128–129, 132, 133, 140, 149, 150, 163, 190, 196n. 8 Poe, Edgar Allan, 185n. 7 Poetry, 106–107, 117, 188n. 24, 191n. 2, 196nn. 6, 8 Portapovitch, Stanislaw, 198n. 23 Pound, Ezra, 9, 42–43, 54, 55, 56, 58, 119, 171, 188n. 24, 189n. 36 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 46, 157 Pritchard, William, 114, 196n. 3 Proust, Marcel, 188n. 23

R Rabinbach, Anson, 174, 201n. 22 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 102 Radin, Paul, 117–118, 198n. 19 Rainey, Lawrence, 184n. 3 “Rain Songs from the Rio Grande Pueblos” (Austin), 116 Redfield, Robert, 109, 143, 144, 146 Reed, Brian M., 184n. 4 Reni, Guido, 140, 199n. 29 Ricks, Christopher, 199n. 29 Riddel, Joseph, 134, 185n. 6

220 Rimbaud, Arthur, 87, 193n. 16 Ripley, Robert, 7, 189n. 35 Rolfe, John, 107, 196n. 8 Rourke, Milton, 143 Rubin, William, 195n. 3 Russell, Frank, 119 Ruth, Babe, 189n. 35

S Saint Simon, Henri de, 159 Sandburg, Carl, 121 Sapir, Edward, 111, 121–122, 143 Sarett, Lew, 116, 119 Schenck, Celeste, 49, 164, 189nn. 30, 33, 34, 200n. 12 Schoenberg, Arnold, 75 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 150 Scriabin, Aleksandr, 2–3, 94 Seldes, Glibert, 75, 78 7 Lively Arts (Seldes), 78 Shakespeare, William, 49 Sheeler, Charles, 11, 161, 167, 201n. 16 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 34, 103, 104, 196n. 5 Shteir, Rachel, 78, 192n. 5, 193nn. 13, 14, 194n. 17 Sieburth, Richard, 56, 189n. 36 Simon, Marc, 183n. 1, 191n. 3 Sitwell, Edith, 186n. 12 Skaff, William, 197n. 15 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 138 Smith, John, 105 Smith, Robertson, 113 Sommer, William, 80, 99 Spengler, Oswald, 98, 111, 163, 199n. 3 Steiner, Christopher, 103, 134, 196n. 4 Steiner, George, 21, 22, 35 Steinman, Lisa M., 199n. 2 Stella, Joseph, 167–168 Stendhal, 55 Stocking, George W., Jr., 10, 102, 109, 121, 122, 146, 196n. 9, 197n. 10 Strachey, William, 127, 198n. 21 Stravinsky, Igor, 27, 75, 186n. 12 St. Sebastian, 140, 199n. 29 Sumner, John, 88, 91, 194n. 18 Sundquist, Eric, 102

Index surrealism, 23, 51 Swann, Brian, 197n. 18, 198n. 21 Symons, Arthur, 119 Symposium, The (Plato), 64, 191n. 40

T Tashjian, Dickran, 187n. 15, 200n. 5 Tate, Allen, 4, 20, 54, 59, 93, 159, 187n. 18, 191n. 2, 200n. 8 Tchelitchev, Pavel, 92 Those United States (Bennett), 169 Tilton, Robert S., 196n. 8 Toomer, Jean, 23, 31, 37–38, 188n. 20, 197n. 11 Torgovnick, Marianna, 197n. 13 Trachtenberg, Alan, 75, 159, 191n. 40, 200n. 9 transition, 107, 120, 198n. 21 Tschaikovsky, Piotr, 2, 94 Tylor, Edward, 115, 131, 137

U Ulysses (Joyce), 29, 88, 95, 187n. 15 Underwood, Wilbur, 35, 54, 67, 89, 95, 188n. 22 Unterecker, John, 77, 92, 185n. 2, 188n. 20, 194n. 21, 198n. 23, 201n. 17 Untermeyer, Louis, 28, 107

V Van Doren, Carl, 107 Vanity Fair, 75, 77 Van Vechten, Carl, 4 Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 28 Vespucci, Amerigo, 197n. 13 Vizenor, Gerald, 101

W Walton, Eda Lou, 109 Weber, Brom, 29, 35, 187nn. 14, 17, 189n. 26, 195n. 1, 200n. 10, 201n. 13 Weber, Max, 167 Weeks, Jeffrey, 190n. 37 Weiskel, Thomas, 26–27, 47, 156, 157, 200n. 6 Whitehead, Alfred North, 150, 199n. 3

Index Whitman, Walt, 2–3, 45, 94–95, 139, 159, 189n. 28, 199n. 26, 200n. 8 “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” 168 “Calamus,” 2, 94–95, 162 “Cape Hatteras” (Crane) and, 151, 153–155, 158, 160, 162, 163– 166, 168, 172– 173, 179–180 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 162 homosexuality and, 162 Leaves of Grass, 139 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 168 “Passage to India,” 153–154 “Recorders Ages Hence,” 162 “Song of Myself,” 45 Specimen Days, 165 Wilde, Oscar, 140, 199n. 29 Williams, Raymond, 197n. 12 Williams, William Carlos, 11, 21–22, 42, 121, 171 In the American Grain, 198n. 21 “Red Wheel Barrow, The,” 21–22 Spring and All, 21 Wilson, Edmund, 75, 77–78, 84–85 Winchell, Walter, 69 Winters, Yvor, 20, 59, 93, 105–107, 108, 114–115, 117, 118–124, 142,

221 146, 147, 159, 161, 195n. 1, 197n. 17, 200n. 8 Immobile Wind, The, 107 Magpie’s Shadow, The, 107, 119, 120 “Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What are We to Think of Professor X?,” 119–120 “Streets, The,” 114–115, 197n. 17 Woods, Gregory, 186n. 14 Wordsworth, William, 46, 47, 136, 157 Wright, William, 54–56, 71

Y Yeats, William Butler, 130 Yingling, Thomas E., 8, 35–37, 40, 71, 93, 140, 159, 184n. 4, 186n. 14, 187nn. 18, 19, 189n. 31, 190n. 38, 195n. 24, 196n. 3, 199n. 28 Young, Philip, 196n. 8 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne), 148

Z Zeidman, Irving, 192n. 5, 193n. 14 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 77–78, 81