Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 293an indication of the inadequacy of Crane’s exposition so much as an accurate
description of the contradictory character of its claims. It is consistent, that
is, with the impossible condition of a poetry that seeks to become both sign
and signified, “both perception and thing perceived,” a poetry projected by a
poet who imagines himself as “pilot,—tempest, too!”
Grossman, who claims that Crane’s poetry, in the absence of “new
structures” of its own to deploy, “tends to hallucinate or thematize” such
structures (Grossman, “Crane’s Intense Poetics,” 224), and Edelman, who
shows how “the structural principles that generate Crane’s figures also
generate recurrent narrative and thematic concerns” (Edelman,
Transmemberment of Song,14),^16 both point to Crane’s lack of a language—
apart from the figural and formal operations of the poetry itself—that would
be capable of explaining and legitimating those operations. Crane has this
problem in mind when, in a letter to Otto Kahn, he says it is “next to
impossible to describe [The Bridge] without resorting to the actual metaphors
of the poem” (Crane, Letters,241). This is the case both because Crane’s
poems leave vacant the position of the poet-critic established in modernist
convention and because Crane’s poems specifically seek a language priorto
criticism, a language Crane connected (misleadingly or not) with
“experience.” Crane’s stylistic anachronism is a sign of this primary language.
I compared it earlier to a “mother” tongue; Crane usually called it “a logic of
metaphor.” This logic, Crane argued, “antedates our so-called pure logic,
and ... is the genetic basis of all speech” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected
Prose, 221); yet it does not refer, strictly speaking, to the past. Crane
preferred to describe it, as he does in “General Aims and Theories,” as a
language of “causes(metaphysical)” and “spiritual consequences” (Crane,
Complete Poems and Selected Prose, 220). It is a nonnarrative language
condensing beginnings and ends, “causes” and “consequences,” signs and
signifieds, in a medium that exists outside history in the timeless present that
Crane invokes at the beginning of “At Melville’s Tomb” and of The Bridge.
In this sense, the archaic language Crane seeks is also radically “new.”
“It is as though,” Crane speculates in “General Aims and Theories,” “a poem
gave the reader as he left it a single, new word,never before spoken and
impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the
reader’s consciousness henceforward” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected
Letters,221). Never before spoken, that is, becauseit is “impossible to actually
enunciate”; it can only be transmitted as an event,as a transaction between
the poem and a reader who retains this new word as fragment or token, as
the kind of “self-evident” and untranslatable sign that Crane describes simply
as “mute evidence of certain things, experiences that the dead mariners