Modern American Poetry

(^282) Langdon Hammer
time, Crane turned toward the sea, toward the past, and toward Melville, the
history of whose reception gave Crane a means to dramatize and interpret
the vicissitudes of his own. Melville was an off-shore ally. His imaginative
world gave literary sanction to Crane’s erotic life, in particular to Crane’s
pursuit of sailors. In another sense, Crane’s sexual voyages in Lower
Manhattan or on the Brooklyn waterfront acted out literary motifs and
ambitions, such as he found in Melville. “Under thy shadow by the piers I
waited,” Crane says to Brooklyn Bridge; it is a scene of desiring that is
neither merely sexual nor wholly literary (Crane, Poems,44). Melville gave
Crane ways to link the homosexual company he found by the piers and “the
visionary company of love” he projected in his poems (Crane, Poems,160).
But Crane did not find in Melville healing and unity of the kind represented
in “Episode of Hands.” The Melville Crane addressed stood for boundless
and despised desires.
“At Melville’s Tomb” proposes a literary history in which Crane would
have a place; in the act of reading Melville, the poem projects a reader for
Crane. An intimate bond with the reader was essential to the kind of
“obscure” poem Crane wrote. The difficulty of Crane’s work calls forth—
and is premised upon—an ideal reader; it is an appeal for aid and connection,
as Crane explained during 1926 in a series of important and related
documents, letters to Gorham Munson and to Harriet Monroe and the essay
(or really the notes) called “General Aims and Theories.” In this chapter, I
plan to meditate on “At Melville’s Tomb” and the prose texts that grew out
of it in order to extract the basic terms of Crane’s poetics and set them
against those of Tate and Eliot. In conclusion, I will turn briefly to “Repose
of Rivers.” Written just after Crane left Patterson in April 1926, “Repose of
Rivers” draws this stage of Crane’s writing life to a close. It also looks ahead
to The Bridge.
Who exactly was Melville in 1925? Whom did Crane invoke by that
name? He was and was not the author who occupies a central position in the
temple of the American Renaissance. That author was available to Crane in
D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature(1923) or in writing
influenced by Van Wyck Brooks’s reevaluation of American romanticism,
including Frank’s Our America(1919) and Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day
(1926). Crane, who sent his first draft of the poem to Frank, understood “At
Melville’s Tomb” as a contribution to this ongoing cultural labor, this search
for “a usable past.” But Melville was not an important figure in Brooks’s
canon, and less important still in “the genteel tradition” Brooks’s canon was
intended to displace. When Melville was revived in the early 1920s, it was
later than Whitman, say, or Twain,^4 and under different circumstances: he