Modern American Poetry

Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 273

and “Sunday Morning.” In a way all of Stevens’s poems about the
relationship between imagination and reality are also justifications of poetry.
Harmoniumwas the first major testament in his lifelong romantic struggle to
“live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.”^60
The sole collection of lyrics that Hart Crane published in his lifetime,
White Buildings(1926) is a thickly textured and radiant record of his quest to
transcend the spirit of negation and become a poet of joy, a seer testifying to
the reality of the absolute. As he suggested in “General Aims and Theories,”
Crane emulated his precursors Rimbaud and Blake and tried to see through
and not withthe eye, to use the real world as a springboard for what Blake
called “innocence” and he called “absolute beauty,” seeking a higher
consciousness and transcendental realm, “moments of eternity.”^61 His poems
often descend into a depth of horror or squalor out of which a grail of light
suddenly radiates:

Look steadily—how the wind feasts and spins

The brain’s disk shivered against lust. Then watch

While darkness, like an ape’s face, falls away,

And gradually white buildings answer day.^62

One of the principal dramas in all of Crane’s work is the attempt to reconcile
the rival claims of the actual and the ideal, the sensuous and spiritual worlds.
There are twenty-eight poems in White Buildings,all but two of them
written between 1920 and 1925 when Crane forged his central aesthetic.
Early poems such as “In Shadow,” “Pastorale,” and “My Grandmother’s
Love Letters” have a quasi-Imagist impressionism and a lyrical fragility.
Crane was seeking a more charged language and more contemporary feeling
in his poems, and by 1919 had turned toward Pound and Eliot for his poetic
values and, through them, to the work of Laforgue and the Elizabethans. He
confessed he read “Prufrock” and “Preludes” continually, and one sees Eliot’s
verbal hardness and ironic literary allusions in the quatrains of such early
poems as “Praise for an Urn” and “Black Tambourine.” He translated
Laforgue’s “Locutions des Pierrots,” and in his most Laforgian poem,
“Chaplinesque”—inspired by Chaplin’s The Kid—he adapted the French
poet’s complex tone and wit in order to parallel the situation of the modern
poet with that of the lonely, abused tramp of the movie. Crane was most
lastingly influenced by “the vocabulary and blank verse of the Elizabethans”
(in one of his letters he refers to his “Elizabethan fanaticism”), and his work
often relies on a high rhetoric derived from reading Marlowe, Webster, and
Donne.^63