Modern American Poetry

T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 359

though with a shift of emphasis. Prufrock’s companion had to be
knowledgeable in the ways of erotic hunger, regret, and repetition, but was
largely a pretext for dramatic confidences. Crane’s use of the word includes
himself and his lover.
A last comparison will bring out the delicacy with which Crane could
portray erotic contact as a hint of some larger acknowledgment that was
never to be spoken. For his provocation he turned again to The Waste Land
and particularly to the lines that follow the imperative “Datta”:

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age or prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed.

Crane’s echo, at once violently explicit and curiously tacit, speaks of

sifting

One moment in sacrifice (the direst)

Through a thousand nights the flesh

Assaults outright for bolts that linger

Hidden.

There had always been in Eliot a need to cherish the personal relation as an
enigma, which by its nature belonged to a realm of untouchable grace and
self-sacrifice. The anxiety of physical surrender is lest you be given
something that was not yours to take: “That is not what I meant at all, / That
is not it, at all.” But Crane’s interest is always to take everything. What
survives his experience will be preserved elsewhere—it is not for him to say
where—as elusive as “bright stones wherein our smiling plays.” The ironic
phrase at the point where memory hopes to recover something more
palpable—“Accumulate such moments to an hour: / Account the total of this
trembling tabulation”—suggests his view of a dry impartiality that will
dispense with the work of recovery. For the idea of counting such moments
is bound to be false; they are really one moment “that stays / As though
prepared.”

I have been discussing Crane’s poetry and his temperament and personal
traits as if these things were plainly related. Yet he is one of those poets who
can persuade many readers much of the time that his poetry has shed any
empirical relation to a life. One might tell a convincing story about his
writing in which the ordinary elements, including the feelings he had for