Modern American Poetry

(^354) David Bromwich
“empire wilderness of freight and rails” connect the memory with a different
nostalgia.
The paths a single echo may suggest are a consequence of disparate
conceptions of poetic authority. When the speaker of “The Fire Sermon” sits
down and weeps “by the waters of Leman,” he imagines a fraternity shared
with the lamenter of Psalms, a kind of fellowship that is possible only across
time. The rail-squatters “ranged in nomad raillery” speak of a casual traffic
among the traditions of the living; and American folk songs, some of them
named in “The River,” are a reminder of the energy of such traditions. You
make a world in art, Crane seems to have believed, out of fragments
knowable as parts of the world. With his submission to the sundry data of
life—a gesture unmixed with contempt—the speaker of “The River” admits
a fact of his personal life, namely, that he has had a childhood: something
(odd as it feels to say so) that cannot be said of the narrator of The Waste
Land.Crane is able here to discover a pathos foreign to Eliot, even in a line,
“Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods,” which itself has a strong
foreshadowing in Eliot’s “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (as also
in “other withered stumps of time”). “Blind fists of nothing” implies an
energy in purposeless action that Eliot withholds from all his characters. The
defeats or casualties in The Bridgeare accepted as defeats without being
accounted final. Sex is the motive of this contrast, with Eliot’s plot steadily
allying sexual completion and disgust—an event and a feeling that Crane
may link incidentally, as he does in “National Winter Garden” and “The
Tunnel,” without implying that these show the working out of an invariable
law.
Crane wrote several letters about The Bridgeand The Waste Land.Only
one of them says his purpose is the antithesis of Eliot’s, and he offers the
comparison in a mood of conjecture rather than assertion: “The poem, as a
whole, is, I think, an affirmation of experience, and to that extent is ‘positive’
rather than ‘negative’ in the sense that The Waste Landis negative.” Because
of its use by the pragmatists James and Dewey, “experience,” in the 1920s,
was a word charged with specifically American associations. It was apt to
serve a common argument that the individual—most of all the individual in
a democracy—possessed among his inward resources a field of experiment
sufficient to define an idea of freedom. Thus the potency Crane would
ascribe to the Mississippi River belonged also to personal consciousness and
imagination: “The River, spreading, flows—and spends your dream.” Eliot’s
preoccupations were closer to metaphysical realism, and likely in the 1920s,
as they were later, to allude with some urgency to a claim on behalf of reality.
Knowledge of reality was, by definition, almost impossible to obtain, and