281If after all these fearful fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven
was not gained;—yet in bold quest thereof, better to sink in boundless
deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck,
if wreck i do.
—Herman Melville, Mardi^1By the fall of 1925, the manuscript of White Buildingshad circulated for
more than a year without securing a publisher.^2 Nor, in this period, had
Crane had much success placing his poems with magazines. Tate took
“Legend” and “Lachrymae Christi” for the Fugitive,but Marianne Moore
rejected “Passage” for the Dial,and Eliot rejected the same poem for the
Criterion.When Eliot rejected “The Wine Menagerie” as well, Crane again
tried Moore. This time Moore accepted Crane’s poem, but with certain
changes, which she took it upon herself to make; and these changes, it turned
out, entailed the reduction of Crane’s eleven pentameter quatrains to three
much abridged, strangely Moore-like strophes, enigmatically retitled
“Again.”^3 Crane, it seems, would either have to see his work rejected by Eliot
and Moore, or submit to their correction.
When he drafted “At Melville’s Tomb” in late October 1925, Crane
turned away from the modernist community represented by Eliot and
Moore, as the speaker of this poem turns his back on the shore. At the same
LANGDON HAMMERDice of Drowned Men’s Bones
FromHart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. © 1993 by Princeton University Press.