Baron Wormser: The Harrowing of Hart Crane (Among Others)

   The situation of the poet in modern times, the times we still very much live in, has been sacrificial: the poet is a sacrifice to the forces that harrow the poet’s soul. The poet speaks – at best, eloquently – but the words remain words and the poet knows that too well. The poet’s faith is a faith in Being, the traditional faith of poetry, but the world in which the poet resides has shifted its faith to invention, to the man-made and is, thus, faithless. The poet’s praise of Being, the natural accompaniment of the poet’s faith, is beside the ever-progressing, seemingly linear, quantifying point. The poet would be a relic but the self – a constant invention – fills in the space handily, for whatever that self is worth.

   Given the socialized nature of poetry nowadays in the United States– highlighted by a far-reaching graduate and undergraduate creative writing apparatus – what I have written about sacrifice is preposterous. The poet is as much a part of the ongoing parade as anyone, as numerous accouterments –conferences, prizes, fellowships, workshops (a suitably industrious term) – attest to. The embrace of capital, which includes all manner of nonprofits, is a capacious one. No one needs to feel left out. The raw edges of Romanticism, that long-standing response to the incursions of the industrialized world, recede into pop spasms that subside into marketing ploys. Punk became nothing so much as a look. As for poets, they even turn up in movies, creating a mild paradox in which an external medium based on moving images tries to acknowledge a purely internal event, a solitary imagination going about its uncertain work. Happily and unhappily, we can see a phantom Sylvia Plath living a phantom life.

    As is the case with any art, the amount of sheer caring that can go into making a poem is something like infinite – given that the poet is very much a finite creature. What drives the poet to create and follow the path of such disproportionate caring is mysterious, even in a world given to explanations for everything. It has something to do with the ideal of form, which means that not every poem has to be a sonnet but, rather, that every poem that is serious about being a poem is searching for the form that best suits what the poet is saying. That form can be a given, as with a sonnet, or it can be movable and organic yet aware it must finally be pinned down on the page as a sequence of words. The form beckons to the poet in some way, a further mystery based on personal predilection but also education, Zeitgeist, and the language in which the poet is writing. The form makes demands on the poet. How much the poet brushes those demands aside and how much the poet deals with those demands is part of that internal drama no movie can capture. 

   The harrowed heroes of this drama in modern times are numerous, some of whom were driven to breakdowns and desperate acts, but most of whom were able to go about life from day to day and string the days together in a way that didn’t make life impossible to live. All lived, however, in a world in which poetry was devalued. Geometry is taught to everyone; poetry, as much a part of the human heritage as geometry, is not. Perhaps the devaluing got on the poet’s nerves, perhaps not. The harrowing went on in any case in the sense of leaving the poet with a feeling that the world was elsewhere. The poet’s world could be agreeable if the poet was good at getting along; it could be disastrous if the poet was not good at getting along. 

   People who love the poetry of modern times are likely to have particular heroes, poets who did the work, sometimes in the face of political forces, sometimes in the face of money forces, sometimes in the face of discriminatory forces, sometimes in the face of all of the above. The poets, however, did not pride themselves on their difficult circumstances. Poetry, by its nature, eschews victimhood. The poet is a maker first and last. For my part, I have a reasonably long list of such heroes, one of whom is Hart Crane, for me an incomparable poet whom I will never exhaust. Also one of those poets whose harrowing was writ large in his poems, not in anything like complaint but in a communicated pressure and passion, a metaphorical tension that sometimes feels it will explode right off the lineated page. No surprise that Crane wrote a poem saluting Emily Dickinson: “You who desired so much – in vain to ask – / Yet fed your hunger like an endless task.” 

   The fate of eloquence in modern times is played out in Crane’s poetry, not in some ultimate fashion but, rather, as a perpetual vision-quest one man puts himself through, a quest in which poetry is, at once, the means and the end. There is no going back; there is no going forward in the sense of betterment. Crane was captivated by the perpetual that resided in poetry, how the themes – transience, unhappiness, destiny, the ministrations of history – were forever. The poet, a subject in his own right, was merely lending his voice. That belonging moored Crane but also pursued him: how authentic was he? What did the authenticity demand of him? Thus, he faced the workaday harrowing, as in get-a-job and make-a-buck, but also the rigors of making imperishable art. For such art was what he aspired to and what virtually every line of his poetry attests to. He aimed as high as anyone ever aimed. The diminution that went with the times – no epics – did not stop him from trying to write “The Bridge.” He would have laughed ruefully if someone offered him an “A” for valor but he more than deserved it. 

   One can pick up his complete poems, open it at random and there it is – an eloquence that won’t quit, that speaks in its allusive way to the inherent power of poetry. Crane managed to merge an Elizabethan energy with a very American voice. It lends his work a unique cadence, traditional yet improvisatory. Here is the opening stanza of “Key West”: “Here has my salient faith annealed me. / Out of the valley, past the ample crib / To skies impartial, that do not disown me / Nor claim me, either, by Adam’s spine – nor rib.” But also there is this from “The River” section of “The Bridge”: “and the telegraphic night coming on Thomas / a Ediford – whistling down the tracks / a headlight rushing with the sound – can you / imagine – while an EXPRESS makes time like / SCIENCE – COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST.” And this ending from his sonnet honoring Shakespeare: “And that serenity that Prospero gains / Is justice that has canceled earthly chains.” 

   “Earthly chains.” There you have it and there the case for poetry in modern times rests, the chains always having been there but the feeling of exaggeration – those capital letters Crane uses – not going away, but rather, at once, infesting and inspiring the poet. Crane’s taste for the archaic – “Thou wieldest” from the Shakespeare poem – makes good sense. He wanted it all and under the mantle of eloquence he could have it all. I suppose what feels most grievous (and I am purposefully minimizing his biography) is how much the lack of esteem for the art in the society-at-large affects a poet who demands that a reader have a sense of the art in order to understand what he achieved, both technically and thematically. To be sure, Crane is taken up with the mystery of humans being here, all our paltry and magnificent doings, all the harrowing inflicted intentionally and unintentionally. And as much as any American poet, Crane assays the debilities and energies of the American scene, which include his own cultural blinders. The accompanying questions are fair ones: What use did Crane with his fondness for the storehouse of diction have for his contemporary America? What did it do for him? The answer, to my mind, is what one finds in the poems – a tempered elation, a determination to meet his world not so much head-on as at every conceivable angle, including myth and symbol.

    As an artist, he knew what was at stake. For many of us, nothing really is at stake because nothing needs to be at stake: we are accounted for via jobs, relationships, avocations, bank accounts, and the myriad distractions of technology. For Crane, a harrowed soul if there ever was one, everything was at stake, an everything that converged in the small space that was a poem – a space somehow unbearable and enthralling at the same time. 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023).