Modern American Poetry

(^294) Langdon Hammer
might have had to deliver.” The mystical “new word” is a secular synecdoche
of a sacred Word, colored by Crane’s experience with the subliminal codes of
both advertising and gay culture. But what that word means is hard to say.
Crane’s own critical language typically falls mute when called upon to specify
the content of his poems’ prophecy (merely “certain messages,” “certain
things,” “certain spiritual events and possibilities”). Munson, Winters, Tate,
and Blackmur, echoing Arnold’s evaluation of the Romantic Poets, judged
that reticence harshly; they claimed Crane did not know enough. But what
they called a lack of knowledge was Crane’s commitment, in his life, to the
role of the autodidact, and his decision, in his work, notto arrive at “definite
knowledge,” not to submit to the various forms of doctrine that were
required by his critics.^17
In “General Aims and Theories,” Crane speaks of his search for “a
morality essentialized from experience directly, and not from previous
precepts or preconceptions” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,221).
Crane’s statement is the basis for an ethics, linked to his defense of Joyce’s
Portrait,and a poetics, linked to his defense of “At Melville’s Tomb.” “If the
poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences
of imagery and logic,” Crane wrote to Monroe, “—what field of added
consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not
lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to the alphabet
every breath or so?” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,237). The
point of novelty, of Crane’s “new word,” is to liberate the poet’s language
from “precepts or preconceptions,” the received order of “the alphabet.”
The “new word” is new, therefore, because it is obscure, and it is obscure
because it breaks with “already evolved and exploited” systems of reference,
which Crane sees as sequential (“already evolved”) systems. “Obscurity,”
Barbara Johnson has written, “... is not encountered on the way to
intelligibility, like an obstacle, but rather lies beyond it.... Obscurity is an
excess, not a deficiency, of meaning.”^18 Johnson’s comments refer to
Mallarmé’s Mystère dans les lettres,but they are also a statement of the issues
at stake in Crane’s letter to Monroe, an essay in which Crane defends himself
from the charge of obscurity by asserting his right to language that exceeds
and transgresses (goes “beyond”) normative expectations, which are
experienced by Crane as proscriptions. To write a “new word,” which is also
to write a forbidden word, is to violate the sequential order Crane ascribes to
both “history” and “logic.”
To deny the poet this transgressive authority, Crane told Monroe, is
not simply to circumscribe present possibilities; it is “to limit the scope of the
medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past”