Modern American Poetry

Introduction 33

Gaston alone, with all his mystic preoccupations, by the privilege

of youth, seemed to belong to both, and link the visionary

company about him to the external scene.

The “privilege of youth” was still Crane’s when he died, and “The
Broken Tower” remains as one of those links. Such a link, finally, is not to be
judged as what Freud called “a false connection” or as another irony to be
ironically recognized, but rather as a noble synecdoche, self-mutilating
perhaps as is a steeled Cognizance, but by its very turning against the self,
endlessly reconstituting the American poetic self, the pneumaor spark of an
American Gnosis.