Making It New: 1900–1945 395articulation,” as he put it, “of contemporary human consciousness sub specie
aeternitas.” Poems could and should, he felt, carry their readers alike “toward a state
of consciousness,” an “innocence” or “absolute beauty”: a condition in which “there
may be discoverable new forms, certain spiritual illuminations.” Crane may have been
driven toward this pursuit of what he termed “a more ecstatic goal” by the pain and
tragedy of his life. As a child, he suffered from what he later described as “the curse of
sundered parenthood”: his parents separated, his mother was admitted to a sanato-
rium, and he went to live with his grandparents. As an adult, he enjoyed some success
as a poet. His first volume, White Buildings, appeared in 1926, and was reasonably
well received, and his most famous poem, The Bridge, was published privately in
1929 and then in a general edition in 1930. But he had to cope with being a homo-
sexual at a time when homosexuality was against the law. And, as he grew older, he
was increasingly dogged by a sense of failure, alcoholic dependency, and a break-
down in personal relationships. While still only 32, Crane disappeared from the ship
returning him from Mexico to New York, and it is probable he committed suicide by
leaping into the sea. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that he sought in his work not so
much an escape as a means of mystical redemption. Each of his poems, Crane hoped,
would supply the reader with “a single new word, never before spoken, and impossible
to enunciate but self-evident in the consciousness henceforward.” Each, in supplying
an access to purer vision, would create a language rather than just use one.
“As a poet,” Crane declared, “I may very probably be more interested in the
so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness
(and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am
interested in the preservation of their logically rigid signification.” He saw each
word, almost, as a cumulus of possibilities and latent associations, many – but not
all – of which could be fired into life by their verbal surrounds – by the words, and
combinations of words, with which they were juxtaposed. The overtones of his
language, consequently, tend to matter more than its strictly denotative meaning:
what echoes in our minds forms an important part of what is being said. This is as
true of the earlier poetry as it is of the later. But in the earlier, as in, say, “Chaplinesque,”
the positive overtones – the feelings of redemptive possibility generated by the
words – tend to be tentative and partial. This gradually changed, as Crane went in
search of what he called “the metaphysics of absolute knowledge.” The immediate
cause of this alteration was a personal experience. Crane apparently enjoyed a
moment of vision, or mystical seizure, which opened fresh possibilities in himself,
and convinced him that “we must somehow touch the clearest veins of eternity
flowing through the crowds around us.” “Did I tell you of that thrilling experience
this last winter in the dentist’s chair,” Crane asked a friend:when under the influence of aether ... my mind spiralled to a kind of seventh heaven
and egoistic dance among the seven spheres – and something kept saying to me – ‘You
have the higher consciousness’? ... I felt the two worlds ... Today I have made a good
start on ... ‘Faustus and Helen’.GGray_c04.indd 395ray_c 04 .indd 395 8 8/1/2011 7:53:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 54 AM