Modern American Poetry

(^292) Langdon Hammer
“capital,” the architectural term for the crown of a column, from the Latin
caputfor “head.” It is possible, with this etymology in mind, to read Crane’s
“scattered chapter” as a simple restatement of the initial figure of “the dice
of drowned men’s bones,” and to see both phrases as early versions of the
architectural collapse announced in the title of “The Broken Tower.” In each
of these phrases, the dismembering of the body, conceived of as structure,
instrument, or vehicle, is identified with the dismembering of texts, because
word and flesh are fractured under the pressure of Crane’s effort to lift and
connect them, to turn each one into the other. It is not at all an admission of
failure, therefore, when a petulant Crane tells Monroe that she should expect
“about as much definite knowledge” to be had from a “scattered chapter” and
“livid hieroglyph” “as anyone might gain from the roar of his own veins,
which is easily heard (haven’t you ever done it?) by holding a shell close to
one’s ear” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,239). For Crane is
willing to sacrifice claims to a conventional mimesis (claims that he is at pains
to defend elsewhere in this letter) in order to interpret the sound of the sea,
remembered in the form of the shell (“The portent wound in corridors of
shell”), as the present sound (and not the echo) of “the roar in his own
veins.”^14 The poem does not simply record the passions of the body; it
consists inthose passions, and magically transmits them.
This turn of mind anticipates Crane’s identification of Shakespeare
with a Prospero absorbed into the fury of his own creating: the author that
Crane apostrophizes in “To Shakespeare” is “pilot,—tempest, too!” (Crane,
Poems,131). In a letter to Munson written in March 1926, and more or less
contemporary with “General Aims and Theories” (which was based upon, if
it did not in fact constitute, the notes that Crane sent Eugene O’Neill for his
undelivered preface to White Buildings),^15 Crane described his poems as
“incarnate evidence” of a kind of knowledge that can be experienced but not
properly named, since one enters—as writer or reader—so fully into that
experience: “Poetry, in so far as the metaphysics of any absolute knowledge
extends, is simply the concrete evidenceof the experienceof a recognition
(knowledgeif you like). It can give you a ratioof fact and experience, and in
this sense it is both perception and thing perceived” (Crane, Letters,237).
Despite Crane’s confidence about poetry’s unmediated access to experience,
there is nothing very simple about this definition. Indeed, as Edelman has
shown in a fine deconstruction of the passage, the “concrete evidence” Crane
writes of, because it refers us to a prior “experienceof recognition,” “must be
founded not on the presence, but on the absence of the experience to which
it refers; it presents itself, that is, as a mediated version of an originally
unmediated vision” (Edelmen, Transmemberment of Song,33–34). This is not