美国 人物列表
非马 William Marr爱伦·坡 Edgar Alan Poe爱默生 Ralph Waldo Emerson
惠特曼 Walt Whitman狄更生 Emily Dickinson斯蒂芬·克兰 Stephan Crane
史蒂文斯 Wallace Stevens弗罗斯特 Robert Frost卡尔·桑德堡 Carl Sandberg
威廉斯 William Carlos Williams庞德 Ezra Pound杜丽特尔 Hilda Doolittle
奥登 Wystan Hugh Auden卡明斯 E. E. Cummings哈特·克莱恩 Hart Crane
罗伯特·邓肯 Robert Duncan查尔斯·奥尔森 Charles Olson阿门斯 A. R. Ammons
金斯堡 Allen Ginsberg约翰·阿什伯利 John Ashbery詹姆斯·泰特 James Tate
兰斯敦·休斯 Langston Hughes默温 W. S. Merwin罗伯特·勃莱 Robert Bly
毕肖普 Elizabeth Bishop罗伯特·洛威尔 Robert Lowell普拉斯 Sylvia Plath
约翰·贝里曼 John Berryman安妮·塞克斯顿 Anne Sexton斯诺德格拉斯 W. D. Snodgrass
弗兰克·奥哈拉 Frank O'Hara布洛茨基 L.D. Brodsky艾米·洛威尔 Amy Lowell
埃德娜·圣文森特·米蕾 Edna St. Vincent Millay萨拉·梯斯苔尔 Sara Teasdale马斯特斯 Edgar Lee Masters
威廉·斯塔福德 William Stafford艾德里安娜·里奇 Adrienne Rich大卫·伊格内托 David Ignatow
金内尔 Galway Kinnell西德尼·拉尼尔 Sidney Lanier霍华德·奈莫洛夫 Howard Nemerov
玛丽·奥利弗 Mary Oliver阿奇波德·麦克里许 阿奇波德麦 Kerry Xu杰弗斯诗选 Robinson Jeffers
露易丝·格丽克 Louise Glück凯特·莱特 Kate Light施加彰 Arthur Sze
李立扬 Li Young Lee斯塔夫理阿诺斯 L. S. Stavrianos阿特 Art
费翔 Kris Phillips许慧欣 eVonne杰罗姆·大卫·塞林格 Jerome David Salinger
巴拉克·奥巴马 Barack Hussein Obama朱瑟琳·乔塞尔森 Josselson, R.詹姆斯·泰伯 詹姆斯泰伯
威廉·恩道尔 Frederick William Engdahl马克·佩恩 Mark - Payne拉吉-帕特尔 Raj - Patel
哈特·克莱恩 Hart Crane
美国  (1899年1932年)

诗词《诗选 anthology》   

阅读哈特·克莱恩 Hart Crane在诗海的作品!!!
  哈特·克莱恩(Hart Crane,1899-1932),生于美国俄亥俄州。自幼就极度焦虑,情绪波动较大。他十几岁就开始写作,虽然从未上过大学,但他按自己的癖好有步骤地消化了伊丽莎白时代剧作家和诗人(莎士比亚、马洛、邓恩)和十九世纪法国诗人(拉法格和兰波)的营养。在纽约居住期间,克莱恩结识了许多文坛大腕,譬如艾伦·塔特、卡·安·波特、E.E.卡明斯等,但由于酗酒和长期的情绪不稳定,他未能和其中任何一人保持长期的友谊。作为艾略特的信徒,他把欧洲文学和传统格律的影响和源自惠特曼的美国感受力结合在一起。
  
  他的最重要的作品——单行本的长诗《桥》——用迷狂的语言展现了一个关于美国历史和精神的重要性的庞大幻象。像艾略特一样,克莱恩致力于运用现代工业化都市中的景观来创造强有力的新的文学语码。
  
  克莱恩从小受基督教科学派教义影响很深,而自己又是同性恋,酗酒成癖,据说惟一的异性恋经历是与朋友马考姆·考利(1898-1989《流放者归来》的作者)的前妻,几乎到了谈婚论嫁的程度,然而他在1932年4月26日午时过后在佛罗里达州外的船上跳海自杀,尸体从未找到。
  
    克莱恩的父亲在1912年推出Life Savers糖果,从此生意越做越发达,他父亲希望他将来有一天能够接手家族企业,然而他却要做一个诗人。他高中毕业后就漂在纽约,给在家乡克利夫兰的父亲写信,希望这个糖果商能够理解他追求艺术的意义。当然,这样的信是很难写,信的结尾其中有这么一段话:“在我收笔之际,我祈愿您能有遐思考—想象仅仅为了纯粹热衷于成就某种美而劳作,--这种美的成果或许难以售卖,亦不能增加其他商品之销量,然而此乃人与人之间的交流,人类理解与启蒙之间的纽带—此乃真正劳作的意义所在。如若您能据此思考,定当理解我为何尾随一颗暗淡的星辰,知道我实非痴愚。我之所求,旨在为后人留下弥有价值之物,而此等追求自会要求我做出一定的牺牲,以便实现自己内在的值得奉献之物。为此目标,我将做出一切可能的牺牲。”
  
  他生前只出版了两本诗集——《白色楼群》(1926)和《桥》(1930)。
  
  让我们从他的诗歌角度去理解作者:
  
   哈特·克莱恩
   Hart Crane
  
   1899——1932
  
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
   ………知道我们迷上了
   那深深的惊奇,我们的故土………
           ——《大桥》
  
    哈特·克莱思的诗与“那深深的惊奇,我们的故土”是那样地协调,因此,虽然他的作品在美国以外广为传诵,但他的风格仍明显地保留着个人和民族的特色。他在超验主义的传统中发展,但无法过一种遁世的生活。他的母亲是一个笃信基督教的科学家,对他的早年生活有很大影响。她引导他相信个人主义精神应该高于居次要地位的物质世界,并企图通过幻想获得一种基本现实。他在精神上做了努力,但在形体上他仍被禁锢在这居于第二位的世界上。他没有华尔顿湖[1];因此陷入了一个残酷的心理矛盾之中,他所受的正规教育很有限,十七岁时就踏入了到处都是失业的社会。他的父母分居很早。他自己是个同性恋者,而且嗜酒成性。他时而乐观,时而感到极度绝望,这种自相矛盾的情况直到他三十三岁自杀之前(1932)仍没有得到解决。
  
    他的书信虽然很少涉及国家大事,但主要谈的是文学方面的事。正是这种强烈、不懈的思想追求,才使他的诗充满了许多(有时是相互冲突的)隐喻。在另一个绝望到来之前,他似乎不顾一切地追求着生命和诗。
  
    哈特·克莱思出生在俄亥俄州的盖雷次维勒,是家中的独生子。他的父母很富有,但在他十岁的时候便离异了。童年时代他很喜欢幻想,而且喜欢打扮得衣冠楚楚。他一生都未忘记他在《贵格山》一诗中称之为“对离异双亲的诅咒”。十七岁那年他离开了俄亥俄州克列佛兰的学校。
  
    克莱思在校期间就已开始写诗。在他保存下来的最早的诗作中,隐喻和意象很多。这既是他较成熟作品的力量之所在,也是其晦涩难懂的原因。
  
   大地的脉搏中沸腾的乳血
   久久地,默默地,奋力挣断这草木的
   腰带……
  
    克莱思干过几年杂活,曾在纽约做过店员,做过广告撰稿员等等。这些不称心的工作他干得都不久。在此期间,他曾独自或偕同母亲到欧洲,古巴等地旅行。1919年,环境迫使他接受了父亲在阿克伦的一家商店给他的一份工作。他与父亲根本合不来,所以这个工作也没有千多久。
  
    1920年他终于定居纽约,想在银行家奧托·卡恩的赞助下,努力靠写诗为生。1923年他完成了第一部重要的长诗《献给浮士德和海伦的婚礼》,后来收入他的第一部诗集《白色建筑》(1926)中。为了使他能够写出《大桥》一诗,卡恩曾借钱给他。克莱思到古巴附近的松树岛住了几个星期,写出了一些很优美的抒情诗。这些诗成为《大桥》的重要组成部分。在两个绝望的年头中,他一个字都没写,接着又到旧金山和法国度过了一个歉收的季节。1929年秋返回美国后,他全凭着个人的意志而不是灵感,完成了《大桥》。1931年他获得了古根海姆研究基金,赴墨西哥准备写一部有关蒙太祖马[2]的史诗,但这时他几乎江郎才尽,精神面临着全面崩溃。他写了几首短诗,组成了《西部要隘:一束岛》和《破裂的塔》:
  
   带铃的绳索在黎明拽来了上帝
   把我放开仿佛我丢落了一个
   末日的丧钟——踟蹰在大教堂中的甬道上
   从深渊到耶稣受难像, 从地狱走出的脚步
   越走越冰凉。
  
    尽管他1932年头一次与一个女人正式结婚,但他的失败感已不可挽回。1932年4月27日,在墨西哥回美国的途中,他从奥里扎巴号客轮上投水自尽了。
  
    从他的早期诗歌中可以看出,他对莎士比亚,韦伯以及马洛的语言都非常熟悉。这对他后期优秀的隐喻风格影响很大。法国诗人于勒·拉弗格以及他使用的讽喻语气对他也很有吸引力。他翻译了拉弗格的《怨歌集》。这位象征派大师对他的影响在《卓别林》和《黑手鼓》中表现得非常明显。他在《卓別林》中写道:
  
   我们进行了适中的调整,
   对这种随意的安慰感到满意
   就象风儿缓缓地
   在很宽敞的口袋里沉积。
  
    然而他坚持的道路是乐观的,他用詹姆士一世时期的丰富语言肯定了艾略特在《荒原》中对生活所作的全部否定。1923年他在一封信中写道:“我把艾略特作为一个向着完全不同方向前进的出发点。就他的情况来说,他的悲观主义是十分合乎情理的,但是我要尽可能地运用我能从他那里学到的知识与技巧,制定一个更为乐观或者(假如我必须在一个怀疑的时代这样说的话)更令人陶醉的目标。”
  
   克莱思的心理向导,但还是风格向导,是惠特曼。
   是的,惠特曼
   重新举起步伐,向前进不停留
   不很快,也不突然——不,决不要从你乎中
   擻开我的手
   惠特曼——
   就这样——
  
    梅尔维尔给他的启发是对大海和大海形象的大量象征性使用。在《白色建筑》的《航海》组诗中他把这个形象用得很有力:
  
   ——然而永恒这伟大的瞬间,
   那无边的洪水, 随风激蕩,
   象锦缎一样席卷……
  
    在《浮士德和海伦的联姻》中,他采用有意识的乐观主义方法去实现他超越物质世界的宏伟目标。全诗的三个部分用现代语言描绘浮土德“我自身的象征,富有诗意或想象力的永恒人物”始终忠实于海伦“这美的化身”。这首诗似乎在极不利的条件下,在显著的乐观主义气氛中,达到了高潮:
  
   格外地赞颂这些年头,它们
   易挥发的流血的手,伸展并且反复敲打着商度
   想象力跨越过绝望,
   超越了交易、词语和祈祷。
  
    语言、结构和形象都晦涩难懂。克莱思在《总目标和总理论》这篇论文中,试图解释这种语言结构和形象。他的企图是要在古典经验和“我们当今这个沸腾、混乱的世界中的不同现实之间搭起一座桥梁,因此我发现‘海伦’乘坐着街车,人们向她求婚和引诱她的酒神节欢宴被转移到一座有爵士乐队伴奏的大都市屋顶花园里。我认为特洛伊陷落的‘净化’可以同最近这次世界大战中的‘净化’相提并论。”他为语言和暗喻的晦涩辩护,说这首诗的结构“建立在暗喻逻辑”的有机原理上。言下之意是说,暗喻的力量胜于逻辑思维,因为它比逻辑思维更直接。它给予我们某种体验,而不是一种思想。暗喻有着自身的逻辑,与思维逻辑截然不同。为此,他引用了这首诗中的一个例子,解释说“一架飞机的速度与高度”用“迅速移动”的意念来暗示要好得多,因为它也暗示出了飞机和飞行速度与静止隆起的地球之间的反衬。”他在论文的结尾说:“语言建立起高塔与桥梁,但本身却始终照例地流动变化着。”他的这些解释有启发性,但没有解决形象拥塞这一基本问题,而且克莱思没有提及听觉谐振(aural resonance)的问题。听觉谐振虽然不重视解释,但贯穿着全诗,给了这首诗那怕是最难懂的地方一种整体连贯感,暗示着令人陶醉的目标。
  
    《白色建筑》中的《航海》是由六首诗组成的组诗,它将得出一个超验的结论——“这个世界上/没有一样东西象这样。”最后一段是歌颂——出神入化必须不受时间与现实世界的限制,但它应该是玄学的,在想象的世界中被变形:
  
   这有形的词,是它抓住
   沉静下来的柳树,固定在其中。
   这是不露声色的回答
   其口音只有从告别话中才能听出。
  
    《大桥》对克莱思的重要性在他的信中讲得很清楚。他从历史和文化的范围里与《埃涅阿斯纪》[3]作比较,“它至少是一首有史诗主题的交响曲”,“其结构与《荒原》同样复杂。”有些批评家认为这是一首工程浩大但没有意义的浪漫故事。不过克莱思最终的诗人地位显然必须根据这一首诗来作判断。的确,克莱思自己也希望这样做。
  
    这首诗的部分结尾是事先就写好的。克莱思对这首诗的构思早已成竹在胸。他把这首诗当作“美国”的一个“神秘的综合体”。“历史与事实、地点等等,一切都必须转化成几乎可以单独起主题作用的抽象形式。”布鲁克林大桥成为希望和未来,美国走向“阿特兰提斯[4]”的象征。这个旅程重新唤起美国历史传说中的人物与地点。哥伦布、玻卡洪达斯[5]、瑞普、凡·温克尔、惠特曼、梅尔维尔、爱伦·坡和其他人物都在诗中出现。“隧道”一段表现的是在到达明亮的阿特兰提斯之前的幻灭感和那种传说中史诗式的下地狱,“——一首歌,一座火之桥!它是中国吗……?在《序诗:致布鲁克林大桥》这首诗中,克莱思实践了他在《现代诗歌》一文中提出的原则:‘除非机器人诗,就象树木那样自然地入诗,否则诗歌就完全失去了当代的功用。”第一段《欢迎玛丽亚》紧接在试图将机器引入诗的《序诗》之后。在这一段中,可以看到哥伦布受到将东方与西方结合为一体的理想的鼓舞,从西路到达了中国:“那里是黎明——/呵,我们的印度王国就沐浴在阳光下,/然而全都失去了,快让这平底舟靠岸!”此刻必须发现新的陆地,现代化的大桥必须通向那想象力未曾探索到的世界,那“仍有一个超越欲望的海岸!”
  
    第二段《玻哈坦的女儿》是阿美利加的象征性“身体”。在这一段中,纯洁的玻卡洪达斯露面了,下属的五个分段都描写的是从纽约没落的物质主义走向理想化的西方,从现在走向过去(以及未来)的形象。在这个过程中,主人公玻卡洪达斯的情人融为一体。通过他在火刑柱上的牺牲,他获得了新生,以进行精神上的旅行:“包裹在那堆火中,我看见更多的守护人醒来/——忽隐忽现,疾跑上山棱象一股潮流。”
  
    第三段《短袍》讲到十九世纪开往中国的那种快速帆船:“劈波斩浪,船底开出绿色的草地/锁在风的机灵里,它们都向东方行驶。”第四段主要是写飞行员是水手的接班人:“穿过明亮的晴空、展开着,未曾睡眠/翅膀剪裁着光明最后的边缘。”
  
    第五段中有以女人,即“美国的身体”为主题的《三首歌》。第六段《贵格山》用的是自传性的材料,哀叹新英格兰精神的没落:“这里曾是‘希望之乡’。”
  
    在《隧洞》中,向地狱的沉降象征性地描绘为向纽约地下铁道的沉降。“谁的头颅在鼓起的铁条上摇摆?谁的身体沿着老铁轨冒烟?”受折磨的灵魂也同样因为是纽约的市民而受到诅咒,天天经受着常规的侮辱。这一段的结尾模仿了艾略特:
  
   我们极度痛苦的吻,你聚集,
   呵,火之子
   聚集——
  
    这首诗向外部摸索前进,走到了露天中,而且在最后一段《阿特兰提斯》中,大桥完工了:
  
   呵,你钢化了的认识,它的跨越
   投入云雀回归的灵巧区域;
   在它绳索可及的范围内
   成双成对地在单个的蝶蛹中歌唱…………
  
    由于《大桥》力图达到史诗效果,所以它一直是英文中最难懂的一首诗。虽然它有缺陷,特别是经过一段难产期后,哈特克莱思努力写成的某些段落,如《印地安纳》、《哈特拉斯角》和《贵格山》,理想主义和乐观主义的狂喜往往很有力,尽管有时很牵强。在美国诗歌中很难找出与之匹敌的对手。这是一部有缺陷的杰作。史诗和浪漫的冲动似乎有分歧。这首诗的长度只彳卜一千行,缺陷是严重的:晦涩、矫揉造作,也许在不自然的乐观主义中有某种程度的不诚实。但是一经朗读,这首诗在节奏上便有那种理想式的雄心勃勃的张力,还有对这一尝试的价值的坚定信念。
  
   ——一首歌,一座火之桥:是中国吗,
   此时怜悯沉浸着青草,长虹套住了
   那条蛇, 雄鹰在叶子间………?
   应答轮唱的低语在天空中摇曳。
  
    克莱思在他生命的最后两年中几乎再没有写出什么诗来,《大桥》把他的精力消耗殆尽了。不过《破裂的塔》提出了一个尖锐的问题。
  
   我倾吐了我的话语。然而它是否同义语
   记载着那个空中法庭的君主
   其股为大地镀上铜色,在伤痕里写下
   适澈的圣谕,曾发誓给于希望一一却变成了绝望?
  
  ------------------------------------------------------------------
   [1]美国超验主义者梭罗实践他超验主义理想的地方。——译者
   [2] 蒙太祖马(montczuma: 1466—1520)墨西哥印地安酋长。西班牙征服该地时被俘,复王位后被同族人杀死。——译注
   [3] 古罗马诗人维吉尔的著名史诗。——译注
   [4] 传说中曾在直布罗陀大西洋西部存在过的岛屿或陆地。——译注
   [5] 玻卡洪达斯: (1595--1617)美国印地安人酋长玻哈坦的女儿。据说曾援救过英国殖民主义老约翰.史密斯.后与一白人成亲。——译注
  
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   作者:琼斯 翻译:汤潮 录校:lixiaoshi 制作:恶人谷珠楼  转贴请注明


  Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote poetry that was traditional in form, difficult and often archaic in language, and which sought to express something more than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. Though frequently condemned as being difficult beyond comprehension, Crane has proved in the long run to be one of the most influential poets of his generation.
  
  Life and work
  Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, Hart Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business with chocolate bars. He originally held the patent for the Life Saver, but sold his interest to another businessman right before the candy took off. Crane’s mother and father were constantly fighting, and in 1916 they divorced. It was shortly thereafter that Hart dropped out of high school and headed to New York City. Between 1917 and 1924 he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and a worker in his father’s factory. From Crane's letters, it appears that New York was where he felt most at home, and much of his poetry is set there.
  
  Crane was gay and associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a pariah in relation to society. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary in order for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work.
  
  Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner.
  
  "Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.
  
  The Bridge received poor reviews for the most part, but much worse than that was Crane’s sense of failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, got notably worse.
  
  While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico in 1931-32, his drinking continued while he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. His only heterosexual relationship - with Peggy Cowley, the soon to be ex-wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley - who joined Crane in the south when the Cowleys agreed to divorce, occurred here, and "The Broken Tower," one of his last published poems, emerges from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity despite his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on 27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba[1] heading back to New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten up for making sexual advances to a male crewmember, which may have appeared to confirm his idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual - he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard.
  
  His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA".[2]
  
  
  Poetics
  Crane's critical effort - like Keats and Rilke - is most pronounced in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Gorham Munson, and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank, Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.
  
  Most serious work on Crane begins with his letters, ____select____ions of which are available in many editions of his poetry; his letters to Munson, Tate, Winters, and his patron, Otto Hermann Kahn, have been particularly valuable. Even his two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his Emersonian "General Aims and Theories" (1925) was written to urge Eugene O’Neill’s critical foreword to White Buildings, then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry.
  
  
  The 'Logic of Metaphor'
  As with Eliot's "objective correlative," a certain vocabulary haunts Crane criticism, his "logic of metaphor' being perhaps the most vexed. His most quoted formulation is in the circulated, if long unpublished, "General Aims and Theories":
  
  As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often ____select____ed less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension.[3]
  
  There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism, in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "...The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explain outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology...."[4]
  
  L. S. Dembo's influential study of The Bridge, Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within the familiar rhetoric of the Romantics:
  
  The 'logic of metaphor' was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; whether or not the vehicle of an image makes sense, the reader is expected to grasp its tenor.[5]
  
  
  Difficulty
  The publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation for a foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal.[6] Even a young Tennessee Williams, then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line--of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect....".[7]
  
  It was not lost on Crane, then, that his poetry was difficult. Some of his best, and practically only, essays originated as encouraging epistles: explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and the variously well-considered or impulsive letters to his friends. It was, for instance, only the exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry when she initially refused to print "At Melville’s Tomb" that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print.[8] But describe it he did, then complaining that:
  
  If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic--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 two? 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?[9]
  
  Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed the exchange alongside the poem: "You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive."[10] In any case, Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories":
  
  New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation....the voice of the present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic. [11]
  
  More recently, Allen Grossman has given a much respected guest lecture at the University of Chicago, "On communicative difficulty in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's The Broken Tower."[12]
  
  
  The 'Homosexual Text'
  Recent queer criticism has pointed out that it is particularly difficult, perhaps even inappropriate, to read many of Crane's poems - "The Broken Tower," "My Grandmother’s Love Letters," the "Voyages" series, and so on - without a willingness to look for, and uncover, homosexual meanings in the text. Tim Dean argues, for instance, that the obscurity of Crane's style owes itself partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual - not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open:
  
  The intensity responsible for Crane’s particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy.... [13]
  
  Thomas Yingling, arguing from a more essentialist viewpoint, articulates yet another problem with the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse."[14] Even more than a personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such biases obscure much of what the poems make clear; see, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings, a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of (heterosexual) family life:
  
  Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
  Though much of what she would not understand;
  And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
  With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
  
  
  And Brian Reed, an emerging critic of Crane deeply interested in Crane's homosexuality, has made contributions to a project of critical reintegration: though sympathetic, Reed notes that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can, of course, also be damaging to a broad appreciation.[15] He has, on a less formal scale, also contributed a study of Crane's famous gay lyrical series, "Voyages," to the Poetry Foundation.[16]
  
  
  Influence
  Crane has long been admired among poets, often passionately so. Some poet-critics have been ambivalent — one thinks of Yvor Winters’s famous turnabout, reviewing The Bridge in Poetry — but even the turning-aways have a tone of affectionate critique: Winters’s review grants Crane’s status of a "poet of genius" as a matter of course, even if he goes on to say that the poem augurs for a "public catastrophe."[17] Indeed, Crane was admired, if sometimes cautiously, by much of the Greenwich Village and New England crowd: Allen Tate and Eugene O’Neill, of course, but also Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams. And though some of his sharpest critics are well known — Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and a few others — Moore did publish his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets.[18]
  
  Over the next two generations, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg read The Bridge together,[19] John Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies, and Robert Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Perhaps most adoringly, Tennessee Williams wanted to be "given back to the sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back...".[20]
  
  Such important affections have made Crane even more of a "poet’s poet," and much of Poet’s Bookshelf, a recent anthology of short, personal essays by contemporary poets, is marked through with debts to him. Thomas Lux offers, for instance: "If the devil came to me and said 'Tom, you can be dead and Hart can be alive,' I'd take the deal in a heartbeat if the devil promised, when arisen, Hart would have to go straight into A.A."[21]
  
  Beyond poetry, Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver," and a painting by Marsden Hartley called "Eight Bells' Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane."
  
  
  Bibliography
  Published by Crane
  White Buildings (1926) ISBN 0-87140-179-7
  The Bridge (1930) ISBN 0-87140-025-1
  Compilations of Letters and/or Poems
  The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Marc Simon, ed. New York: Liveright (1986; Centennial edition with intro. by Harold Bloom, 2000) ISBN 978-0-87140-178-9
  O My Land, My Friends: The ____Select____ed Letters of Hart Crane. intro. and commentary by Langdon Hammer, forward by Paul Bowles. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows (1997) ISBN 978-0-941423-18-2
  Hart Crane: Complete Poems and ____Select____ed Letters, Langdon Hammer, ed. New York: The Library of America (2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-99-0.
  Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Thomas Parkinson ed. and commentary. Berkeley: University of California Press (1978)
  Biographies
  Mariani, Paul. The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane. New York: W.W. Norton & Company (1999) ISBN 0-393-32041-3
  Untrecker, John. Voyager (1969)
  ____Select____ed Criticism
  Corn, Alfred. 'Hart Crane's "Atlantis,"' The Metamorphoses of Metaphor. Viking (1987)
  Dean, Tim. ‘Hart Crane’s Poetics of Privacy,’ American Literary History 8:1 (1996)
  Dembo, L. S. Hart Crane’s Sanskrit Charge: A Study of The Bridge. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press (1960)
  Gabriel, Daniel. Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot and Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2007)
  Grossman, Allen. ‘Hart Crane and Poetry: A Consideration of Crane's Intense Poetics With Reference to “The Return,”’ ELH 48:4 (1981)
  ----. ‘On communicative difficulty in general and “difficult” poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's “The Broken Tower,”’ Poem Present lecture series at The University of Chicago. (2004)
  Hammer, Langdon. Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1993)
  Herman, Barbara. ‘The Language of Hart Crane,’ The Sewanee Review 58 (1950)
  Lewis, R. W. B. The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1967)
  Pease, Donald. ‘Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility’, PMLA 96:1 (1981)
  Ramsey, Roger. ‘A Poetics for The Bridge,’ Twentieth Century Literature 26:3 (1980)
  Reed, Brian. ‘Hart Crane’s Victrola,’ Modernism/Modernity 7.1 (2000)
  ----. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press (2006)
  Riddel, Joseph. ‘Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure,’ ELH 33 (1966)
  Rowe, John Carlos. ‘The “Super-Historical” Sense of Hart Crane’s The Bridge,’ Genre 11:4 (1978)
  Schwartz, Joseph. Hart Crane: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. (1983)
  Snediker, Michael. "Hart Crane’s Smile," Modernism/modernity 12.4 (2005)
  Trachtenberg, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1979)
  Unterecker, John. "The Architecture of The Bridge," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3:2 (1962)
  Winters, Yvor. "The Progress of Hart Crane," Poetry 36 (June 1930)
  ----. In Defense of Reason. New York: The Swallow Press and William Morrow (1947)
  Yannella, Philip R. ‘“Inventive Dust”: The Metamorphoses of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” Contemporary Literature 15 (1974)
  Yingling, Thomas E. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1990)
  
  Notes
  ^ Mariani 1999 p. 421
  ^ Untrecker, John. Voyager (1969)
  ^ Hammer 1997 p. 163
  ^ Hammer 1997 p. 166
  ^ Dembo, L. S. Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960) p. 34
  ^ See article on White Buildings
  ^ Lyle Leverich. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) p. 162
  ^ Mariani p. 191
  ^ Hammer 1997 p. 281
  ^ Hammer 1997 p. 282
  ^ Hammer 2006 p. 164
  ^ Allen Grossman (2005). On communicative difficulty in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's The Broken Tower. GENWI. Retrieved on 2008-04-11.
  ^ Tim Dean. "Hart Crane's Poetics of Privacy," American Literary History 8:1 (1996) p. 84
  ^ Thomas Yingling. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. p. 3
  ^ Brian Reed. Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006)
  ^ Brian Reed on 'Voyages': http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=180083
  ^ 'The Progress of Hart Crane,' Poetry 36 (June 1930) pp. 153-65
  ^ Lee Oser. T. S. Eliot and American Poetry. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press (1998) pp. 112-14.
  ^ Haw, Richard. The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History (2005) p.175. Also, see the Literary Kicks article, linked below.
  ^ Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1997) pp. 9-10
  ^ Poets Bookshelf p. 126
  
  See also
  Walt Whitman (a hero to Crane)
  Harold Bloom (literary critic inspired by Crane)
  Modernist poetry in English
  Poetry of the United States
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