Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 295(Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,235). In “At Melville’s Tomb,”
Crane seeks to recover an outlaw and genius of the past, a venture in which
he is motivated by his sense of himself as a poet whose faith in the authority
of personal “genius” had been cast into disrepute, if not outlawed, by “the
rational order of criticism.” Behind this project is Crane’s ongoing struggle
to find sanction for a criminalized homoeroticism that he fetishistically
identified with the sailor—a marginalized man, like the hoboes of “The
River,” who is not at home in the productive economies of home and
workplace, but who remains dedicated, in exile, to the sexual community of
other “drowned” men.
The codes and conditions of male homosexual fellowship inform
Crane’s projection of a relation between reader and poet that is not properly
sexual, perhaps, but peculiarly, even transgressively intimate, secretive, and
physical. Recall the way Crane’s “new word” is transmitted: it remains
unspeakable (“impossible to actually enunciate”) even while it continues to
operate, like a password, “as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness
henceforward.” In “A Letter to Harriet Monroe,” Crane expands on this
notion with a question: “In the minds of people who have sensitively read,
seen, and experienced a great deal, isn’t there a terminology something like
short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist
ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh
concepts, more inclusive evaluations?” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected
Prose,237–38). What Crane describes as a “short-hand” code, or “connective
agent,” is the rhetorical strategy he elsewhere calls “inferential mention.”
The special persons sensitized to such inferences form a kind of league, and
they seek each other. The examples of this rhetorical strategy Crane gives
come from Blake and Eliot. In effect, Crane makes Blake a modernist, and
claims a place in modernism for Crane’s Blakean stance; he is also trying to
show how Blakean Eliot is, or could be. Implicitly, Crane is trying to validate
his own early readings of both Blake and Eliot.
Crane explains Eliot’s simile in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Every
street lamp that I pass / Beats like a fatalistic drum,” in this way: “There are
plenty of people who have never accumulated a sufficient series of reflections
(and these of a rather special nature) to perceive the relation between a drum
and a street lamp—viathe unmentionedthrobbing of the heart and nerves in a
distraught man which tacitlycreates the reason and ‘logic’ of the Eliot
metaphor” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Prose,237). Whatever value
this has for reading Eliot, it has a great deal of value for reading Crane.
Metaphor works in Crane’s account as a relation between two terms the logic
of whose connection is to be inferred or implied by those who are in a