Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 307“‘Voyages,’ four remarkable poems by Allen Tate will appear in the next issue.’” The
magazine folded before the error could be corrected. See Unterecker, Voyager,407.
- Dial80, no. 5 (May 1926): 370.
- Consider a transitional text such as John Macy’s The Spirit of American Literature
(Garden City, N.Y., 1913). Macy’s history includes chapters on figures from the
nineteenth-century canon (Whittier, Longfellow, Irving) and from the twentieth-century
canon (Whitman, Twain, James), but mentions Melville only once (beside Stowe and
Norris). - See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville 1940–1980(Madison, Wis., 1982),
especially 232–49. Carl Van Doren’s comments on Melville in The Cambridge History of
American Literatureisolate a point at which Melville’s reputation as a romancer classed
with Cooper begins to give way to his reputation as a novelist classed with Hawthorne. - Melville calls himself a man “who lived among the cannibals,” describing his fears
for his reputation, in a letter to Hawthorne, which is quoted by Raymond Weaver, Herman
Melville: Mariner and Mystic(New York, 1921), 21. On Crane’s “cannibal” costume, see
Unterecker, Voyager,404, and Tate’s comments mentioned above in Chapter Two. - On Crane’s response to Melville, see R.W.B. Lewis, The Poetry of Crane: A Critical
Study(Princeton, 1967), 202–3 and passim, and Joseph Warren Beach, “Hart Crane and
Moby-Dick,” in Trachtenberg, ed., Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays,(Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1982), 65–79. - A copy of the draft Crane sent to Frank, October 26, 1925 (Beinecke Library, Yale
University). - R.W.B. Lewis and John Hollander both note that Crane’s phrase elides the first
part of the familiar phrase, “far and wide.” See Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane,204, and
Hollander, The Figure of Echo,92. This characteristic gesture brings out the spatial
continuity implied in “wide” and suppresses the temporal discontinuity in “far”; it is part
of Crane’s effort to disregard his irreversable distance in time from Melville by
reimagining it as a traversable distance in space. - John T. Irwin, “Naming Names: Hart Crane’s ‘Logic of Metaphor,’”Southern
Review11, no. 2 (1975): 286. - Harvey Gross, “Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens,” in Bloom, ed., Hart Crane:
Modern Critical Views,49. Gross’s comments, which concern the pentameter in “To
Brooklyn Bridge,” come from his study Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: A Study of Prosody
from Thomas Hardy to Robert Lowell(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964). Gross continues: “Perhaps,
by definition, the apostrophe requires no explicit grammar.... But without the binding
meter, the omission of verbs and uncertain use of reference would be destructively
apparent.” Herbert Liebowitz makes a related point with reference to Crane’s image of the
vortex: “The centrifugal force of Crane’s emotions needed to be counteracted by the
centripetal force of established verse structures.” See Liebowitz, Hart Crane: An
Introduction to the Poetry(New York, 1968), 164. - Sharon Cameron provides this phenomenology of Crane’s composition in “The
Broken Tower”: “In the dawn rung in by the bells during which ‘The stars are caught
and hived in the sun’s ray,’ the swarming of fragmentary radiance to a honey-colored
whole literalizes on another, natural level the gathering of plenitude to one entity.... In
fact it is the gathering of the stars to the mass of the sun that overflows the bounds of
conceptual fullness and compels the ‘breaking’ in the next stanza. The release from
permanent form, the spilling of plenty back into the world, leads to the dissolution of