(^410) Anita Patterson
Another American modernist, Hart Crane, examined how the violent
history that gave rise to African American music ultimately shaped the
imagery and cadence of his own idiom:
“what do you want? getting weak on the links?
fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change—IS THIS
FOURTEENTH? it’s half past six she said—if
you don’t like my gate why did you
swing on it, why didja
swing on it
anyhow—”
And somehow anyhow swing—
The phonographs of hades in the brain
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
A burnt match skating in a urinal—
Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS
To brush some new presentiment of pain—^41
In 1948, in The Auroras of Autumn,Wallace Stevens vividly probed the
sources of his ambivalent love of and animosity toward primitivist decadence:
the mind’s eye first summons up a festive scene of “negresses” dancing and
then suddenly becomes cruelly analytic, mocking the whole party for their
brutish disorderliness:
The father fetches negresses to dance,
Among the children, like curious ripenesses
Of pattern in the dance’s ripening.
For these the musicians make insidious tones,
Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.
The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.
............
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?^42
Of Hughes’s modernist contemporaries, however, the poet whose
interest in realism, racial cross-identification, and American music comes
closest to his own is not Pound, Crane, or Stevens but Eliot. In many of the