(^308) Langdon Hammer
wholeness, to ‘broken intervals.’” Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre
(Baltimore, 1979), 231.
- John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the
American Renaissance(New Haven, 1980), 349. - John Hollander charts the literary history of the music of the shell in Images of
Voice: Music and Sound in Romantic Poetry,Churchill College Overseas Fellowship Lectures
No. 5 (Cambridge, 1970). Hollander distinguishes two myths about the meaning of the
sound “inside” shells: one, that it is the sound of the sea; two, that it is “the roar of one’s
own veins.” “If the first myth is ... Romantic, the substituted one is just as certainly
Symbolist, in, among other things, re-authenticating the imagined exterior sea-sound in
the inner perception of an equivalent blood-tide: a Mallarmean shell, and a metaphoric
presence not wholly absent from Hart Crane’s image of a shell that ‘secretes / Its beating
leagues of monotone.’” Hollander, Images of Voice,17. - In a postscript to his letter to Munson, composed March 17, 1926, Crane describes
with approval the treatment of “the logic of metaphor” and “the dynamics of inferential
mention” in the notes he had prepared for O’Neill and passed along to Munson (Crane,
Letters,237). “General Aims and Theories,” this letter to Munson, and “A Letter to
Harriet Monroe” are so closely related as to read like versions of one document. - This is the generative insight of Edelman’s own study, which proceeds as an
anatomy of three figural strategies in Crane’s work—anacoluthon, chiasmus, catachresis—
identified not only with three thematized actions—breaking, bending, bridging—but with
the three phases of Crane’s career represented by (again in series) “For the Marriage of
Faustus and Helen,” “Voyages,” and The Bridge. - Crane’s most important statement of that refusal, which links a defense of his
homosexuality and a defense of his tastes and practices as a poet, is the letter he wrote to
Winters on May 29, 1927, beginning, “You need a good drubbing for all your recent easy
talk about ‘the complete man,’ the poet and his ethical place in society, etc.” For a text of
the letter and a commentary on the relationship between the two men, see Thomas
Parkinson, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence(Berkeley, 1978),
especially 84–93. - Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference(Baltimore, 1980), 68.
- Sharon Cameron describes this strategy in a way useful for thinking about Crane:
“Dickinson’s lyrics are in fact conceived within a tradition of utterance that imagines
redemption itself to rest upon a speaker’s ability to fight free of the grip of this world, and
to embrace instead that unthinkable space whose time exacts no separations” (Cameron,
Lyric Time,259). Mutlu Konuk Blasing persuasively links Crane and Dickinson in her
rhetorical study of American poetry. She uses Crane’s image of the vortex to explain:
“Technically, Crane adopts Dickinson’s subversive strategies, pitting the centripetal force
of formal and literal limitation against the centrifugal force of semantic expansion. The
meaning of such poetry lies precisely in its articulating and disarticulating rhetoric and
syntax, which precludes certainties and unequivocal readings.” Blasing, American Poetry:
The Rhetoric of Its Forms(New Haven, 1987), 189. - Edelman, Transmemberment of Song,especially 210–15; Bloom, “Introduction,” in
Bloom, ed., Hart Crane: Modern Critical Views;and Irwin, “Figurations of the Writer’s
Death.” For a systematic definition and history of the trope, see Hollander, The Figure of
Echo,133–49. - Edward Brunner presents a strong argument for locating the poem’s composition