Modern American Poetry

(^274) Edward Hirsch
Crane’s poems are “drunk with words.” He was more interested in
associational meanings than in ordinary logic and characteristically took
unusual and highly connotative words and combined them in unexpected and
musical ways. Reproved by the editor of Poetryfor the difficult obscurity of
his work, especially “At Melville’s Tomb,” he responded that his goal was to
find “a logic of metaphor” beyond the boundaries of “so-called pure logic.”^64
The principle of organizing a poem through the “emotional dynamics” of
suddenly forced conjunctions correlates to the visionary subject and goal of
the poems. Crane’s verbal excess, his metaphorical and extralogical way of
organizing a poem and, ultimately, his idealism, were attacked by such
antiromantic critics as R.P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and his friend Allen
Tate, although their pioneering essays helped to uncover the motivating
romantic principles of Crane’s poetic.^65
Crane admired and imitated the way that Eliot’s poems encompassed
contemporary life, but after the publication of The Waste Landhe began to
think of his work as a positive alternative and direct counterstatement to
Eliot. In a letter to Allen Tate, he declared: “In his own realm Eliot presents
us with an absolute impasse,yet oddly enough, he can be utilized to lead us
to, intelligently point to, other positions and ‘pastures new.’ Having
absorbed him enough we can trust ourselves as never before, in the air or on
the sea. I, for instance, would like to leave a few of his ‘negations’ behind me,
risk the realm of the obvious more, in quest of new sensations, humeurs.”^66
Six months later he emphasized his own “more positive, or (if [I] must put it
so in a skeptical age) ecstatic goal ... I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual
events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of
Blake.... After his perfection of death—nothing is possible in motion but a
resurrection of some kind.”^67
“For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” is the first fruit of Crane’s
attempt to break away from the poetry of negation. It is his first long poem,
a direct precursor to The Bridgein its countering of pessimism and in its
expression of a renewed hope in the American city. The poem employs
Crane’s own version of the mythical method, fusing the present with the past,
paralleling contemporary life and ancient culture through the symbolism of
Faustus (imaginative man) and Helen (ideal beauty). In a way Crane uses a
reduced version of Eliot’s method in order to “answer” The Waste Land,
insisting—in a Blakean formulation—that we “Greet naively—yet intrepidly
/ New soothings, new amazements.”^68 “Faustus and Helen” is the first poem
in which Crane tries to absorb the influences of the modern era—jazz,
electric light displays, advertising—and become a visionary poet of the
Machine Age. As he wrote to Tate, “Let us invent an idiom for the proper