Modern American Poetry

(^352) David Bromwich
The Waste Landand The Bridgewere not assisted imaginatively by the
encyclopedic ambition to which they owe their conspicuous effects of
structure. The miscellaneous texture of the poems is truer to their motives.
A little more consistently than Eliot’s early poems, The Waste Landdivides
into two separate registers for the portrayal of the city, the first reductive and
satirical, the second ecstatic and agonistic—the latter, in order to be released,
often seeming to require the pressure of a quotation. At any moment a detail
such as “The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to
Mrs. Porter in the spring” may modulate to a style less easily placed:
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
Though the transitions of The Bridgeare less clear-cut, part of Crane’s
method lies in a pattern of allusions to The Waste Land.This plan had
emerged as early as his letter of September 11, 1927, to Otto H. Kahn, and
later, piece by piece, in the echoes he found of Phlebas the Phoenician, who
“Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss”—
lines that haunted him already in “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.”
Let us turn to a kind of allusion more precisely dependent on context.
Eliot in The Waste Land,himself looking back to Shakespeare’s Tempest,
overhears a character in “The Fire Sermon” in an unexplained trance of
thought.
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him....
Pondering those lines in “The River,” Crane added to the Old World image
of destiny the local accretions of a childhood in the American Midwest. The
effect is a startling recovery and transformation:
Behind
My father’s cannery works I used to see