T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 345Hart Crane would have approached the poetry of Eliot. But the obstacles to an
adequate view of the subject have been planted by Crane as much as by Eliot.
Open and impulsive as Crane’s letters generally are, they give a misleading
impression of this particular debt. His quotable statements of general aims and
theories, which align his poetry with Eliot’s, tend to take an adversarial stance
when Eliot himself is in the picture. This happened, I think, in part because
Crane had resolved early to write The Bridgeas an answer to The Waste Land.
Another motive may have been that his frequent correspondent in matters
concerning Eliot was Allen Tate, a contemporary who shared Crane’s advocacy
of Eliot’s poems but who was already, in their exchanges of letters in the 1920s,
on the way to admiring Eliot as a prophet of civilization. The influence of
“Gerontion” on the “Ode to the Confederate Dead” differs in character from
the influence of The Waste Landon The Bridge.In the first case the relation is
that of principle and illustration, in the second that of statement and counter-
statement. Affinity seems a truer word than influence to describe the latter sort
of kinship—a point I can bring out by comparing the early poems “La Figlia
che Piange” and “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.”
Both poems address a feminine presence that is not quite maternal, and that
is touched by erotic warmth; a presence whose memory must be appeased
before the poet can venture into his own acts of love and imagination. Yet the
poems exhibit, and exemplify for the sake of each poet’s future, distinct uses
of sympathy. Eliot’s is a tenderness that will at last be detached from erotic
passion, whereas Crane is seeking a temporary freedom from familial piety,
earned by an intense avowal of such piety. Notwithstanding this divergence
of motives, the poems share a single story and a music. The wish of the poets
to serve as guardians at a scene of their former lives, protectors of something
that was suffered there, is curiously blended with a self-command that makes
them stand back from the scene. The result is a tone at the brink of an irony
that neither poet entirely wants to formulate. The revealing point for
comparison, it seems to me, is the “turn” of the poems—the place in each
where the poet speaks of his seclusion from the image with which he began.
In “La Figlia che Piange” that image is the glimpsed attitude of a woman at
the top of a stair, holding a bunch of flowers; in “My Grandmother’s Love
Letters,” it is a view of a nook by the corner of the roof where the letters have
long been stored. Self-conscious in their bearing toward the women they
write about, both poets are also safely hidden in their watching; and a sense
of memory as a sheltering medium, protective for the rememberer and the
image, touches with regret their knowledge of the person whose life cannot
be recovered.