From Confusion to Cummings

An exchange of letters from the pages of The Dial in 1923, as given in William Wasserstrom's The Time of the Dial (p. 58-59):

Mr. Dial Editor

My Mama told me to ask you what I want to know, so please tell me, dear sir. I am 11 years old and my mama lets me cut the pages of the Dial each month and I love to look at the funnies, next to the poetry.

Today I saw some funny poetry by Mr. Cummings. It had such funny lines and the punktuation and capitellization is so funny. My teacher makes me stay after school and my father licks me cause I punktuate and capitilize like Mr. Cummings does.

I said to my mama now can I write like they do in the Dial and she says I ll take your head off if you do what am I sending you to school for anyway to write like that.

And I said to my mama what does it mean an she said god knows cause nobody else does thats sure I've ask lots of Dial readers and they dont know no more than I do and at that its harder to break into print than to break out of jail thats what my mama said. Please Mr. Dial editor is it going to be like Cummings has it then I won't have to go to school any more to learn punktuation and capitellzation. Please answer.

Your little friend
Eugene Winton

3155 W. 38th Ave
Denver, Colo.

P.S. My mama says I won't get a reply unless I enclos a stampd envlup so heres 1.



Master Eugene Winton
3153 W. 38th Ave.
Denver, Col.

My dear Master Winton,
I am afraid that we can offer you very little consolation as to the matter of Mr Cummings' capitalization and punctuation. While Mr Cummings persisted in spite of spankings, and finally became a poet thereby, we could not officially council any one else to do likewise.

You must also remember that if all the world were like Mr Cummings, Mr Cummings' system of punctuation would lose some of its effectiveness. It is partially because the rest of us must devote our time to getting the rules right that Mr Cummings can get effects out of their violation.

But, going farther than this, I should point out that Mr Cummings does use his violations to a purpose. They are not mistakes; they are intentional. It used to be the practice, for instance, when one wanted to emphasize something, to underline it, or in printing to put it in italics. But we have learned today that much more emphasis can be gotten by other ways (this old way having been worn smooth). Look at the advertisements in a magazine, for instance, and see how much is done precisely along the lines which Mr Cummings uses in his poetry. Yet when you see an ad beginning with a small letter, do you write to the company in protest?

Wishing you all the success in the world with your school work, I am
Faithfully yours,
Kenneth Burke
Editorial Department

Director's Cut

So I'm preparing my conference paper for the 26th, which is largely composed of quotations from letters by famous poets writing about little magazines, followed by tiny little commentaries from me. However, there a few choice quotes I'm not able to fit into the paper proper. Once again, legitimate academia's loss is the blogosphere's gain! Behold:

Randall Jarrell on the Partisan Review coterie:

“Although its politics are doctrinaire and academic in that funny New York professional-left way, they haven’t prevented it from printing other groups, Stalinists excepted. It’s an awfully shrewd, professional, competent magazine, so far as the editing is concerned. The worst things about it are its extraordinary limitations and lack of imagination: everything is looked at from the point of view of someone who’s semi-Marxist, fairly avant-garde, reasonably Bohemian, anti-bourgeois, cosmopolitan, anti-Stalinist, lives in New York, likes Mondrian, etc., etc., etc. It assumes that New York is the Paris of America, that the United States is Europe all over again, a backward Europe: in fact, it’s barely an American magazine, and always sinks with a sigh of joy into the friendly harbor of Sartre, Camus, [unreadable], the great European writers. (This Sartre-Camus isn’t my joke: I heard two of the editors said to me saying that American writers would be as good as Camus and Sartre if they had a movement like existentialism to organize and inspire them.)”


William Carlos Williams on Poetry:

“I have come to distrust the magazine Poetry. We are not fostering kindergartens and there’s no use paying good money for the sake of sentimentalizing over some new writer prodigy unless he produces. And if he does produce and is a prodigy there us [sic: is] no room for him in a mag like that because of ‘previous commitments’ with the young. It’s a rotten policy and produces unreadable drivel. The general criticism offered is litte [sic: little] better. Once in a while something does happen, of course, but that isn’t the point. The critical standards involved are woefully sophomoric. I don’t see any sense in paying good money for that. Perhaps such a first step should be retained because of its undoubtedly important history, perhaps there is no other way to serve the newcomer - keep the door open and all that. A hell of a lot of cheap stuff wanders in though. Certainly it’s unattractive to me.”


Edmund Wilson on The Kenyon Review:

“The Kenyon Review is indescribably awful.”

And on The Sewanee Review:

“Allen Tate, before he left the Sewanee, never succeeded in lifting the shadow of the influence of J.C. Ransom or being able to refuse filling its space with the writings of his cousins and aunts.”







Similarly, Kenneth Burke on Kenyon:

“I can’t discuss the matter at any length. For, honest to God, I just don’t know. Ransom gets all the farm boys to wiping the mud off their shoes in the name of ‘nice’ thinking – and the choice seems to be between that and muddy thinking.”





And, finally, Williams on better days:

“The vistas are limitless. But had damn well better be limited if any good is to be done.
“I think I’d vote for Whitman, in his time."

WTF WCW?

"You know, I just came across a medical article, which I know will interest you. It seems that men are not of course all male, as women are not all women. Well, the proof that men are not all male goes something like this: remove the ovaries of a female mouse. Let the gal recover. Then take a pint of male piss. Extract it with alcohol or acetone or ether or what not — I've forgotten. Do this again. Then again. Finally evaporate the stuff down until it is a thin jelly. Of this jelly take a tenth of a cubic centimeter and inject it into the muscle of said mouse. The mouse starts to menstruate!

"Now this is due to the fact that men excrete female hormones in their urine. Ain't that something. So always take a piss before or after you jerk off or you might end some day by finding yourself pregnant — with a castrated mouse perhaps.

"Anyhow this is all true."

(letter to Kenneth Burke, July 29, 1931, quoted in East, The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, 53)

justice league

Ubuweb has now posted a link to a full archive of the 1949 Western Round Table on Modern Art, at which one can view a transcript and read along to their hours of good-quality audio. I bring it up here, especially, because the debate constantly and overtly returns time and again to questions of taste and the public sphere, and especially the role of the museum and the critics as arbiters of taste in relation to abstract art. At one point Wright refers to Mondrian's work as "just monkey business." There's a rather startling exchange between Duchamp and Wright in session C, which is only partly recorded but has full (presumably full) representation in the typescript. I don't have time to say more than this right now (my prospectus defense is tomorrow morning and I've got some class planning to tinker with), but I reckon this archive might be something we all come back to, here and in our various projects. Enjoy!

CSI: Paterson

I spent a whole bunch of hours today in the archives! One thing on my long list of items to view was the 1934 Objectivist Press first edition of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony. A weird and wonderful book that I think Adrienne might really like. The copy in Rare Books was uncut, so I had the bizarre and thrilling opportunity to take a bone tool to the pages as I read. At this point my comments will be nowhere near so incisive, but I figured I would copy below various amazing quotations from the introductory essay by Kenneth Burke, "The Matter of the Document." The book begins with a short, comically modest note: "I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases - not a great many as law reports go - and found almost all that follows. C.R." In the result, there's a whole other angle on Objectivism to be found here: of forensics and the "objectivity" of Law, which seems to me to be perhaps willfully muted in Zukofsky's rather easy assumption of ethical-lyrical care in "Sincerity and Objectification" and his account of "Rezi".

Before those quotes, tho, I want to give the first and last paragraphs of Testimony, to give a sense of what's going on here. The work is divided into three sections, "Southerners and Slaves," "Sailing Ships and Steamers," and "East and West." The first excerpt I give is just the first paragraph of a poem, the second is a complete section of the last poem in the book.

"Dun had been down to a sunken boat, and was coming back in his skiff about dark when he met Broadus and Lucas. He got out of his skiff, and went with them in theirs. He came back at one o'clock and when he got into bed, asked his wife where Elizabeth was. She was in the other bed in the room, but asleep, said Dun's wife, because she had called her and she did not answer. Dun then told his wife that they had shot 'Dutch,' but had not killed him. 'Dutch' was picking up wood when he was shot, and he ran and hallooed to those in the house, and cried out, 'Boys, I am shot!' Broadus, the damned fool, ran and left his hat." (1)

Do you think the first line, which is the first line of the book, recalls the opening of the Cantos? I love the sound patterns in the first line (Dun/down/sunken/coming, and the rep. of K's), but the book doesn't give an indication of what "poetic" work has been done to the extracts, so one cannot know if these are manipulations of Rezi's or felicities of the found prose. The interjection "Broadus, the damned fool" lends a sense of spoken witness and a seeming break from "objectivity" that is nevertheless still contained within the supposedly neutral, balanced gaze of the Law. (Important to point out, though: the book bears no judgments, shows no outcomes other than the often bloody remains of a crime scene - e.g. "The ax broke the teeth and left the lip hanging at one end. Ned then turned the ax in his hands and struck Ely on the back of the head with the eye of the ax and broke his skull." (6))

"As the case was turned over upon the wharf, a rattling was heard inside. The looking-glass was broken. The pieces were wedge-shaped; the cracks radiated from a center, as if the glass had been struck by a pointed instrument." (71 - "Depression" section 4, last lines of the book)

Imagine this lineated, cut out some of the verbs, and (at a stretch) you have a passable early poem by Oppen, or at least a note you'd find in an early Daybook. The cracked mirror image is an interesting one on which to end, as it suggests to me that Reznikoff is implying that law testimonies literalize and mediate the transition from realist or naturalist narratives to the "cracked mirror" of modernist prose and poetry (I know that's a bit swift, I can expand on that perhaps). This paragraph (stanza? vignette?) also, as in R's project here on the whole, reifies the evidentiary tradition of imagism, as highlighted by Kenner in The Pound Era -- the structural similarity between the "clue" or luminous detail in late Victorian detective fiction, providing a grammar with which to "read" the detritus of urban/late capitalist existence, and the imagist detail (cf. H.D.'s "Traces" in Sea Garden, on which I had meant to write something ages ago).

The cracked glass may also recall, and stand in tension with, Zuk's "Program: 'Objectivists' 1931", in which Zukofsky compares Objectivist poetry to the process of a "lens bringing the rays from an object into focus." The ref. behind both may be old lens-grinder Spinoza, about whom both Rezi and Zuk wrote poems, but if anyone (Evan, you philosophy buff you) can flesh out the bearing of that link, i'd be much obliged.

Here's Reznikoff standing on the bus:

Anyway, Burke it up!:

"As the 'scientific' quality of modern art came more and more into evidence, we began to note a progressive development of fiction towards the 'case history.' It is only recently that we have become aware of a complementary movement, the movement of the 'case history' towards fiction." (xi)

"In the end, any simplification of a human life is a fiction, and any case history is a simplification. And it is sometimes salutary for us to remind ourselves that even the vast 'world-historical' perspectives of a Spengler may be at bottom but the 'documentary substantiation' of an attitude as simple and moody as the lyric. Spengler is perhaps the ultimate instance of this process wherein a feeling or a metaphor is, by dint of industrious evidence, given massive intellectual backing. His 'morphology of history' is a poem, a pedant's dogged version of Shelley's Ozymandias, the Stimmung proper to one sonnet expanded inot a life work, plus a military pessimism that led the author to interpret existence in terms of a struggle (misleadingly called Werden, or Becoming) which necessarily made good times look like a battlefield and peace like decay." (xii)

[Reznikoff's] "profession itself [a lawyer] providing the principle of selectivity, he could leave the matter of 'truth' to the records as available." (xiii)

"'A few years ago,' he has explained, 'I was working for a publisher of law books, reading cases form every state and every year (since this country became a nation). Once in a while I could see in the facts of a case details of the time and place, and it seemed to me that out of such material the century and a half during which the United States has been a nation could be written up, not from the standpoint of an individual, as in diaries, nor merely from the angle of the unusual, as in newspapers, but from every standpoint - as many standpoints as were provided by the witnesses themselves.'" (xiii)

"In the large, however, his bare presentation of the records places us before people who appear in the meager simplicity of their complaints. They have grievances, they have brought those grievances before the law, whose abstract, forensic 'justice' will often treat their problems in a manner wholly alien to the subjective quality of their distress. And one is made to feel very sorry for them, a humane response which far too much of our contemporary literature has neglected, with its overemphasis upon dominance, conquest, the attainment or frustration of 'success.' (xiv)

"Whatever individual standpoints they may represent, be they plaintiff or defendant, interested or disinterested witness, slave or slave-owner, brutal sea-captain or recorders of his brutality, these bearers of testimony represent in the large the 'law court point of view.' In this respect Mr. Reznikoff's work embodies in miniature the problem of the 'whole truth' as it arises in a civilization marked by many pronounced differences in occupational pattern." (xv-xvi)

Change of plans

I'm in a crisis. Originally I had planned to read English, American and a smattering of French poetry from 1870 straight through to 1970: basically the series that begins in Baudelaire and ends in John Ashbery, which we might reductively call French Poetry Coming In and Fucking With the English Tradition (or FPCIFWET for short). Piece of cake, right? In doing so, I'd hoped to avoid making a clear Modernism/Postmodernism break, basically relying on Ashbery's and the other New York Schoolers' productive re-readings of Modernism to help me tie it all up into a single revisionist Santa Claus narrative.

But now I think I need to stop at the 50s. It's just too hard to link it all together. Even by the beginning of the 40s the series is losing its internal coherence, everything is changing, you can feel it, the major Modernists are hardening into caricatures who can be toppled by the merest breeze of common-sense, England is a different England and America a different America and France is like the dozenth of a succession of different Frances, although not everybody in all of them seem to have realized it yet.

I'm reading Randall Jarrell's "The Obscurity of the Poet" today and the tone is so despairing and reactionary compared to earlier essays on Modernism and its social reception. The thing about this "early postmodern" period (let's say roughly 1940-1950) is that it can be easily overlooked because poetry doesn't actually change all that much: the work of Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman and Bishop seem pretty much like a natural outgrowth, maybe even a watering-down, of the expected Modernists like Yeats, Eliot and Auden, with Pound becoming ascendant in some of the more marginal quarters. But the self-justifications, and the climate in which such justifications seem necessary, are qualitatively different. The trajectory from Graves and Riding in 1927 (stubborn, brilliant resistance of Modernist dogma) to Burke and Wilson in 1931 (gentle skepticism about some of Modernism's larger claims combined with a firm laissez-faire attitude toward culture in general) to Jarrell in 1951 (hurt and freaked out that not just Modernism, but all poetry of all periods, is in danger of being permanently scrapped by the bourgeois democratic public) speaks volumes about the situation that eventually births full-fledged Postmodernism, in its heyday of 1960-1980, the simultaneous sprint into the arms of theory on the one hand and systematic dismantlement of Modernist prejudice and sense of superiority on the other.

Consider these representative excerpts from Jarrell's essay: "it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure" (3); "the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry" (4); "Any American poet under a certain age, a fairly advanced age — the age, one is tempted to say, of Bernard Shaw — has inherited a situation in which no one looks at him and in which, consequently, everyone complains that he is invisible" (10); "today, many of the readers a poet would value most have hardly learned to read any poetry; and many of those who regularly read his poems have values so different from his that he is troubled by their praise, and vexed but reassured by their blame" (15); "the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast" (18); and finally, lazily, late-fortiesishly pinning it all on popular culture: "Boys who have read only a few books in their lives, but a great many comic books, will tell one, so vividly that it is easy to sympathize: 'I don't like books because they don't really show you things; they're too slow; you have to do all the work yourself.' When, in a few years, one talks to boys who have read only a few comic books, but have looked at a great many television programs — what will they say?" (19).

What these statements, en masse, add up to is an idea that Modernism, in its public character as a project of popular re-education, has utterly failed, not because of any lack of persuasiveness on its own terms but because the bottom fell out: there's no public worth convincing any more. As Jarrell himself admits, he can only be sure of this failure because he once passionately believed in such a project. (A quick perusal of his essays on Moore and Williams confirms this: he's drunk the Kool-Aid, all right.) As he puts it, "these are conclusions which I have come to slowly and reluctantly, as the world forced them on me. Would that I were one of those happy reactionaries, born with a Greek vocabulary as other children are born with birthmarks and incomes … But I had a scientific education and a radical youth; am old-fashioned enough to believe, like Goethe, in Progress — the progress I see and the progress I wish for and do not see. So I say what I have said about the poet, the public, and their world angrily and unwillingly." Even more discouraging is Jarrell's proposal for responding to this failure: "If my hearers say, 'But what should we do?' what else can I answer but 'Nothing'? There is nothing to do different from what we already do: if poets write poems and readers read them, each as best they can — if they try to live not as soldiers or voters or intellectuals or economic men, but as human beings — they are doing all that can be done" (21). In other words, the public apparatuses of Modernism are no longer worth wielding against a public that is more disinterested than it is hostile. Therefore, no more manifestoes, no more false claims to importance: the postmodern, for a while anyway, will take the path of least resistance. This is giving the argument up for dead, the argument for Modernism or for literature and art in general, not because art isn't something that can or should be argued about (Graves' and Riding's position, as I understand it) or because the argument is incorrectly framed (Burke's and Wilson's position), but because the argument is unwinnable. Which is a very different thing.

So: Postmodernism, for my purposes (for now), starts around about 1950, when all the arguments for and against Modernism (if not Modernism itself) are exhausted and familiar. There is an interregnum of a decade or so before there are theoretical issues to get worked up over again — namely, whether we ought not to do something to, and with, contemporary poetry after all — though this time they will be fought out almost entirely inside the academy, and be more markedly metaphysical than social in character.

And I need to stop here. I'm fascinated by this shift, I love some of the poetry that results from it, I want to know everything about it, but, for God's sake, you have to stop somewhere — sometimes. Plus we have World War II to worry about.

Next week I'm gonna read a lot of Hugh Kenner and try to make sense of my life.

A brisk trade in messages in bottles

Kenneth Burke on Art for Art's Sake, from Counter-Statement (1931):

"Closely allied with the 'mystification' of the new [Symbolist] movement, came the tour d'ivoire or 'pure' art movement. The most pretentious writing, that is, was done by men whose methods and preoccupations seemed certain to limit their reading public considerably. They were 'experts,' and nothing was more abhorrent to a civilization of specialists than artists who likewise were specialists … In any event, the rarity and electness of 'pure' art seemed — in an age of propaganda — negative, retiring, and powerless. What was the value of neglected excellence, when the world was glutted with crude fiction? Had not the spread of literacy through compulsory education made readers of people who had no genuine interest in literature? Would not this group henceforth form the majority of the reading public? And would not good books pale into insignificance, not because they had fewer readers than in the past (they had more) but because an overwhelming army of bad readers had been recruited? The Art for Art's Sake slogan now began to apply more specifically to the art of the minority, those writers for whom, so far as the vast public was concerned, the publication of a new work was like putting a bottle out to sea.

"A masterpiece, privately printed in a limited edition of two hundred copies, seemed to furnish some cause for derision. Yet The Little Review had a much larger circulation than the magazine published by Goethe and Schiller." (69-70)

This is a useful passage, I think, for understanding how the idea of Art for Art's Sake came about, why it made people at the time so angry, and — most important of all — how it obscured the real historical conditions of literary Modernism, making it seem as if obscure or radical literature had become less popular, when in fact it had an unprecedentedly large readership. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Lawrence Rainey.

The End of the 20s (Part 2)

Wednesday and Thursday: Hart Crane vs. Harold Bloom and R.P. Blackmur
I took two days for Hart Crane, because I was determined that this time I was going to learn to like him. Without quite knowing why, I've never quite gotten the big deal about Crane; even Angus Fletcher couldn't convert me, and that guy is pretty persuasive, so I was more or less ready to give up on him after one final graduate-school try. That's not quite what happened, though; read on…

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that a lot of other people haven't quite decided whether they like Crane either. If most of the Modernists have clearly benefited from the influence of academic criticism, and the New Critics in particular, then Crane has probably mostly suffered. Certainly he suffers, in my opinion, from having such a pompous defender as the latter-day Harold Bloom, one of whose ubiquitous introductions adorns my copy of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. It begins, unpromisingly: "Born in the year 1930, the year Hart Crane published The Bridge, I never reflect on that year of my birth without also meditating on Crane's visionary epic" (xi) — I know just what you mean, I feel the same way about The Muppet Movie. Bloom (who says he's been reading Crane since the age of ten!) spends much of his introduction talking not about Crane but about his critical reception, including (of course) Bloom's own late, heroic intervention in that reception, a story which allows him to do a lot of name-dropping about how he convinced Empson and Kenneth Burke to like Crane after all.

For all his trademark windbaggery, though, Bloom does put his finger on the big historical problem with Crane: as the one Modernist who openly embraces the heritage of Romantic-era American poetry — running from Whitman through Dickinson — he is easily detachable from the master-narrative of early 20th century literary history, which states that the important Modernists either rebelled against Romanticism or repressed it. Of course, this same apostasy makes him perfect for Bloom's counter-canon, which essentially regards Modernism as an enormous distraction from the genuine series of strong American poets, which goes (say it with me now) Emerson-Whitman-Dickinson-Stevens-Crane-Ashbery. Seen in this light, Crane is either everything or nothing: either the one visionary Romantic who saw through Modernism's revisionist narrative (Bloom's take), or an ambitious also-ran who failed to get with the program of the moment, to his work's and reputation's detriment (R.P. Blackmur pretty much sums it up when he attributes to Crane's work "the distraught but exciting splendor of a great failure," 316).

Both schools of criticism deal with Crane by treating him as an exception, and this seems unfair, because in the end Crane's not so radically (or conservatively) different from his Modernist compeers: he's clearly read a lot of the same books (White Buildings has epigraphs from Rimbaud and Ben Jonson); has the same love/hate relationship to democratic institutions and popular culture; in fact, on the evidence of The Bridge, he would've been a better standard-bearer for early Eliotic critical values than Eliot himself ultimately became.

What he is is slightly belated, in much the same way as Cummings: that is, his work emerges first into a climate of criticism founded on essentially the same tenets in which he himself believed. Presumably poets like Pound, Eliot, Moore and Williams gained something from bringing their work first in an atmosphere of general incomprehension: it allowed them to experiment more recklessly, and to exhibit a wider range of quality and "neatness of finish" (to borrow a borrowed phrase from Marianne Moore). They didn't have to worry about producing perfect poems, because there was no clear standard of perfection: the criteria to judge their poetry didn't yet exist. It's no wonder, then, that in some cases (notably the case of Eliot) their reputations would swell to gigantic sizes: such overcompensation was necessary to counteract the assumed prevailing hostility, whether it really existed or not. (This is, naturally, the story of postmodernism as well, as it was advocated for by cheerleaders like Charles Altieri and Marjorie Perloff. Thank you for allowing me a Jim Longenbach moment.)

By the time the likes of Blackmur and Burke were writing, though, Modernism had Modernist critics to contend with, critics eager to do something with their criteria besides enshrine new demi-gods. Thus poets who began publishing after 1922, lacking sufficient time to gain the prestige of incomprehensibility, were at a serious critical disadvantage. You can sense the passion which Blackmur brings to demonstrating that Crane is almost, but not quite, a great poet; he mercilessly picks apart Crane's obscurities in order to judge whether or not they are earned, and you can't help but feel that if he were to apply these same tests to many of his beloved Stevens' lines, he'd be forced to reach the same conclusions. (In this criticism of small differences you can really see the influence of Blackmur on his student Michael Fried: compare the famous ending of his 1968 attack on minimalism, "Art and Objecthood.")

So, in short, I think the problem is not so much that Crane was "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism" (which is how Bloom puts it) as that he was a High Modernist in the era of High Modernism. He had the disadvantage to be writing in a period when, to some degree anyway, Modernism had become the norm: when the burden was not on the critics to find some redeeming value in the work of les jeunes but on the poets to measure up to the established recent canon. Many of Crane's poems, interestingly, include anxious references to books or pages, a habit he may have picked up from Mallarmé but which also places him as a reader of Modernism and not simply a writer of it, and which may bespeak a fear of close reading that his immediate predecessors didn't have to suffer (they were presumably more worried about being read at all). Examples include "Possessions" with its "page whose blind sun finally burns / Record of rage and partial appetites"; "Passage" which seems to meditate on some obscure connection between plagiarism ("my stolen book in hand") and self-plagiarism ("Memory, committed to the page had broke"); and the "scattered chapter" Crane tries to recover "At Melville's Tomb." (He also writes quite a lot about "hair," here and in The Bridge; not sure what to make of that.)

All that said, I think I basically agree with Blackmur that most of Crane's short lyrics in White Buildings don't really come off, though there are extraordinary lines in almost all of them. (Bloom would probably tell me to shut up and come back when I've read more Shelley.) The Bridge, though, is another story. I'm not sure that I've read the entire thing before, and on this reading I finally see why Crane's reputation rests on it: it really is one of the great long poems of the 20s. Blackmur's major criticism of it is that "Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman" (303-304); that is, he was a natural representative of "the school of tortured sensibility" writing in the affirmative heroic/patriotic mode of "Song of Myself." I wouldn't say Blackmur's wrong, but I would contend that this unlikely cross between Baudelaire and Whitman is exactly what's interesting about The Bridge. But of course I would say that, because in many ways it looks forward to what the New York School poets would eventually be doing: Frank O'Hara in particular, who absolutely insists on a productive tension between poétè maudit-esque "tortured sensibility" and Whitmanian democratic grandeur. (This was kinda, sorta what I wrote about in my paper on O'Hara for Jeremy's class; Jeremy, if you're reading this, I'm sorry I didn't make this clearer at the time.) A fuller reading of Crane's poem will have to wait until I have some more time on my hands, but let me just remind myself to consider it alongside O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings" some day — I think the contrast would be revealing.

Winner: Crane!