Modern American Poetry

T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane 351

diffusive emotions that matter to him, would have thought of offering a
setting to such lines as

Recesses for it from the fury of the street

or

And through all sound of gaiety and quest,

lines that are touchstones of the confidence and isolation of the man who
wrote them. A certain striding eloquence seems natural to Crane, and fits with
the truth he speaks to the antagonist of “Chaplinesque” (the boss or agent of
the state, the character in Chaplin’s films who sizes up the tramp with a
lowering grimace): “We can evade you, and all else but the heart: / What blame
to us if the heart live on.” It is the reverse of Eliot’s sentiment at the end of
“Preludes”: “The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant
lots.” The steps of the women may look random as they cast about for bits of
fuel, but a capricious determinism governs their smallest movement. At times
the steps of the tramp will look no different. But “Chaplinesque” takes its
buoyancy from a resolve—the mood of someone going somewhere—which
the tramp asserts at irregular intervals. The forward motion is an illusion, but
one that Crane brings to enchanted reality by siding with this hero.

My comments on Eliot and Crane are shaped by an aesthetic judgment as
personal as any other. Prufrock and Other Observationsand White Buildings
seem to me among the greatest achievements of modernity, quite as original
in what they accomplish as The Waste Landand The Bridge.One of the cheats
of high modernist theory, abetted by Eliot in “Ulysses,Order, and Myth” and
embraced by Crane in the conception of his longer poems, was the
supposition that the virtual order of human knowledge must stand in some
interesting relation to literary form. It followed that one could make the
modern world systematically intelligible for art by respecting and executing
the proper form of a knowledge special to art—by viewing the novel, for
example, as the genre of the “transcendent homelessness of the idea” (the
phrase is Lukács’s, from The Theory of the Novel). With modernism, genre
itself briefly and misleadingly became, as it had been in the eighteenth
century, a master clue to the earnestness of the author’s claim to represent
reality. To writers like Eliot and Crane, this suggested the tactical propriety
of expanding the lyric to claim again the scope of the epic. Of the pretensions
of modernist poetry, none has dated so badly as this.