Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1

(^362) David Bromwich
Let not the pilgrim see himself again
For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin
Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes;
—Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!
But from the first there was another order of poetry that mattered to Crane,
and that represents him as faithfully. An agnostic naturalism persisted from
“Repose of Rivers” to “The Broken Tower.” As one looks back on that span
of work, its dominant note comes, one cannot fail to see, not just from the
city but from the city of Eliot. What is true of “Chaplinesque” and
“Possessions” is also true of “Recitative” and “To Brooklyn Bridge” and “The
Tunnel.” To say these poems were achieved in dialogue would be to assert
too little for the poems and too little for both poets. Crane wrote poetry of
a kind unimaginable without Eliot; and the accomplishment of Eliot feels
somehow larger in this light.
1996

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