閱讀哈特·剋萊恩 Hart Crane在诗海的作品!!! | |||
他的最重要的作品——單行本的長詩《橋》——用迷狂的語言展現了一個關於美國歷史和精神的重要性的龐大幻象。像艾略特一樣，剋萊恩致力於運用現代工業化都市中的景觀來創造強有力的新的文學語碼。
剋萊恩從小受基督教科學派教義影響很深，而自己又是同性戀，酗酒成癖，據說惟一的異性戀經歷是與朋友馬考姆·考利（1898-1989《流放者歸來》的作者）的前妻，幾乎到了談婚論嫁的程度，然而他在1932年4月26日午時過後在佛羅裏達州外的船上跳海自殺，屍體從未找到。
剋萊恩的父親在1912年推出Life Savers糖果，從此生意越做越發達，他父親希望他將來有一天能夠接手傢族企業，然而他卻要做一個詩人。他高中畢業後就漂在紐約，給在家乡剋利夫蘭的父親寫信，希望這個糖果商能夠理解他追求藝術的意義。當然，這樣的信是很難寫，信的結尾其中有這麽一段話：“在我收筆之際，我祈願您能有遐思考—想象僅僅為了純粹熱衷於成就某種美而勞作，--這種美的成果或許難以售賣，亦不能增加其他商品之銷量，然而此乃人與人之間的交流，人類理解與啓蒙之間的紐帶—此乃真正勞作的意義所在。如若您能據此思考，定當理解我為何尾隨一顆暗淡的星辰，知道我實非癡愚。我之所求，旨在為後人留下彌有價值之物，而此等追求自會要求我做出一定的犧牲，以便實現自己內在的值得奉獻之物。為此目標，我將做出一切可能的犧牲。”
他生前衹出版了兩本詩集——《白色樓群》（1926）和《橋》（1930）。
讓我們從他的詩歌角度去理解作者：
哈特·剋萊恩
Hart Crane
1899——1932
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………知道我們迷上了
那深深的驚奇，我們的故土………
——《大橋》
哈特·剋萊思的詩與“那深深的驚奇，我們的故土”是那樣地協調，因此，雖然他的作品在美國以外廣為傳誦，但他的風格仍明顯地保留着個人和民族的特色。他在超驗主義的傳統中發展，但無法過一種遁世的生活。他的母親是一個篤信基督教的科學家，對他的早年生活有很大影響。她引導他相信個人主義精神應該高於居次要地位的物質世界，並企圖通過幻想獲得一種基本現實。他在精神上做了努力，但在形體上他仍被禁錮在這居於第二位的世界上。他沒有華爾頓湖[1]；因此陷入了一個殘酷的心理矛盾之中，他所受的正規教育很有限，十七歲時就踏入了到處都是失業的社會。他的父母分居很早。他自己是個同性戀者，而且嗜酒成性。他時而樂觀，時而感到極度絶望，這種自相矛盾的情況直到他三十三歲自殺之前(1932)仍沒有得到解决。
他的書信雖然很少涉及國傢大事，但主要談的是文學方面的事。正是這種強烈、不懈的思想追求，纔使他的詩充滿了許多(有時是相互衝突的)隱喻。在另一個絶望到來之前，他似乎不顧一切地追求着生命和詩。
哈特·剋萊思出生在俄亥俄州的蓋雷次維勒，是傢中的獨生子。他的父母很富有，但在他十歲的時候便離異了。童年時代他很喜歡幻想，而且喜歡打扮得衣冠楚楚。他一生都未忘記他在《貴格山》一詩中稱之為“對離異雙親的詛咒”。十七歲那年他離開了俄亥俄州剋列佛蘭的學校。
剋萊思在校期間就已開始寫詩。在他保存下來的最早的詩作中，隱喻和意象很多。這既是他較成熟作品的力量之所在，也是其晦澀難懂的原因。
大地的脈搏中沸騰的乳血
久久地，默默地，奮力掙斷這草木的
腰帶……
剋萊思幹過幾年雜活，曾在紐約做過店員，做過廣告撰稿員等等。這些不稱心的工作他幹得都不久。在此期間，他曾獨自或偕同母親到歐洲，古巴等地旅行。1919年，環境迫使他接受了父親在阿剋倫的一傢商店給他的一份工作。他與父親根本合不來，所以這個工作也沒有千多久。
1920年他終於定居紐約，想在銀行傢奧托·卡恩的贊助下，努力靠寫詩為生。1923年他完成了第一部重要的長詩《獻給浮士德和海倫的婚禮》，後來收入他的第一部詩集《白色建築》(1926)中。為了使他能夠寫出《大橋》一詩，卡恩曾借錢給他。剋萊思到古巴附近的松樹島住了幾個星期，寫出了一些很優美的抒情詩。這些詩成為《大橋》的重要組成部分。在兩個絶望的年頭中，他一個字都沒寫，接着又到舊金山和法國度過了一個歉收的季節。1929年秋返回美國後，他全憑着個人的意志而不是靈感，完成了《大橋》。1931年他獲得了古根海姆研究基金，赴墨西哥準備寫一部有關蒙太祖馬[2]的史詩，但這時他幾乎江郎纔盡，精神面臨着全面崩潰。他寫了幾首短詩，組成了《西部要隘：一束島》和《破裂的塔》：
帶鈴的繩索在黎明拽來了上帝
把我放開仿佛我丟落了一個
末日的喪鐘——踟躕在大教堂中的甬道上
從深淵到耶穌受難像， 從地獄走出的腳步
越走越冰涼。
儘管他1932年頭一次與一個女人正式結婚，但他的失敗感已不可輓回。1932年4月27日，在墨西哥回美國的途中，他從奧裏紮巴號客輪上投水自盡了。
從他的早期詩歌中可以看出，他對莎士比亞，韋伯以及馬洛的語言都非常熟悉。這對他後期優秀的隱喻風格影響很大。法國詩人於勒·拉弗格以及他使用的諷喻語氣對他也很有吸引力。他翻譯了拉弗格的《怨歌集》。這位象徵派大師對他的影響在《卓別林》和《黑手鼓》中表現得非常明顯。他在《卓別林》中寫道：
我們進行了適中的調整，
對這種隨意的安慰感到滿意
就象風兒緩緩地
在很寬敞的口袋裏沉積。
然而他堅持的道路是樂觀的，他用詹姆士一世時期的豐富語言肯定了艾略特在《荒原》中對生活所作的全部否定。1923年他在一封信中寫道：“我把艾略特作為一個嚮着完全不同方向前進的出發點。就他的情況來說，他的悲觀主義是十分合乎情理的，但是我要盡可能地運用我能從他那裏學到的知識與技巧，製定一個更為樂觀或者(假如我必須在一個懷疑的時代這樣說的話)更令人陶醉的目標。”
剋萊思的心理嚮導，但還是風格嚮導，是惠特曼。
是的，惠特曼
重新舉起步伐，嚮前進不停留
不很快，也不突然——不，决不要從你乎中
擻開我的手
惠特曼——
就這樣——
梅爾維爾給他的啓發是對大海和大海形象的大量象徵性使用。在《白色建築》的《航海》組詩中他把這個形象用得很有力：
——然而永恆這偉大的瞬間，
那無邊的洪水， 隨風激蕩，
象錦緞一樣席捲……
在《浮士德和海倫的聯姻》中，他采用有意識的樂觀主義方法去實現他超越物質世界的宏偉目標。全詩的三個部分用現代語言描繪浮土德“我自身的象徵，富有詩意或想象力的永恆人物”始終忠實於海倫“這美的化身”。這首詩似乎在極不利的條件下，在顯著的樂觀主義氣氛中，達到了高潮：
格外地贊頌這些年頭，它們
易揮發的流血的手，伸展並且反復敲打着商度
想象力跨越過絶望，
超越了交易、詞語和祈禱。
語言、結構和形象都晦澀難懂。剋萊思在《總目標和總理論》這篇論文中，試圖解釋這種語言結構和形象。他的企圖是要在古典經驗和“我們當今這個沸騰、混亂的世界中的不同現實之間搭起一座橋梁，因此我發現‘海倫’乘坐着街車，人們嚮她求婚和引誘她的酒神節歡宴被轉移到一座有爵士樂隊伴奏的大都市屋頂花園裏。我認為特洛伊陷落的‘淨化’可以同最近這次世界大戰中的‘淨化’相提並論。”他為語言和暗喻的晦澀辯護，說這首詩的結構“建立在暗喻邏輯”的有機原理上。言下之意是說，暗喻的力量勝於邏輯思維，因為它比邏輯思維更直接。它給予我們某種體驗，而不是一種思想。暗喻有着自身的邏輯，與思維邏輯截然不同。為此，他引用了這首詩中的一個例子，解釋說“一架飛機的速度與高度”用“迅速移動”的意念來暗示要好得多，因為它也暗示出了飛機和飛行速度與靜止隆起的地球之間的反襯。”他在論文的結尾說：“語言建立起高塔與橋梁，但本身卻始終照例地流動變化着。”他的這些解釋有啓發性，但沒有解决形象擁塞這一基本問題，而且剋萊思沒有提及聽覺諧振(aural resonance)的問題。聽覺諧振雖然不重視解釋，但貫穿着全詩，給了這首詩那怕是最難懂的地方一種整體連貫感，暗示着令人陶醉的目標。
《白色建築》中的《航海》是由六首詩組成的組詩，它將得出一個超驗的結論——“這個世界上／沒有一樣東西象這樣。”最後一段是歌頌——出神入化必須不受時間與現實世界的限製，但它應該是玄學的，在想象的世界中被變形：
這有形的詞，是它抓住
沉靜下來的柳樹，固定在其中。
這是不露聲色的回答
其口音衹有從告別話中才能聽出。
《大橋》對剋萊思的重要性在他的信中講得很清楚。他從歷史和文化的範圍裏與《埃涅阿斯紀》[3]作比較，“它至少是一首有史詩主題的交響麯”，“其結構與《荒原》同樣復雜。”有些批評傢認為這是一首工程浩大但沒有意義的浪漫故事。不過剋萊思最終的詩人地位顯然必須根據這一首詩來作判斷。的確，剋萊思自己也希望這樣做。
這首詩的部分結尾是事先就寫好的。剋萊思對這首詩的構思早已成竹在胸。他把這首詩當作“美國”的一個“神秘的綜合體”。“歷史與事實、地點等等，一切都必須轉化成幾乎可以單獨起主題作用的抽象形式。”布魯剋林大橋成為希望和未來，美國走嚮“阿特蘭提斯[4]”的象徵。這個旅程重新喚起美國歷史傳說中的人物與地點。哥倫布、玻卡洪達斯[5]、瑞普、凡·溫剋爾、惠特曼、梅爾維爾、愛倫·坡和其他人物都在詩中出現。“隧道”一段表現的是在到達明亮的阿特蘭提斯之前的幻滅感和那種傳說中史詩式的下地獄，“——一首歌，一座火之橋！它是中國嗎……？在《序詩：緻布魯剋林大橋》這首詩中，剋萊思實踐了他在《現代詩歌》一文中提出的原則：‘除非機器人詩，就象樹木那樣自然地入詩，否則詩歌就完全失去了當代的功用。”第一段《歡迎瑪麗亞》緊接在試圖將機器引入詩的《序詩》之後。在這一段中，可以看到哥倫布受到將東方與西方結合為一體的理想的鼓舞，從西路到達了中國：“那裏是黎明——／呵，我們的印度王國就沐浴在陽光下，／然而全都失去了，快讓這平底舟靠岸！”此刻必須發現新的陸地，現代化的大橋必須通嚮那想象力未曾探索到的世界，那“仍有一個超越欲望的海岸！”
第二段《玻哈坦的女兒》是阿美利加的象徵性“身體”。在這一段中，純潔的玻卡洪達斯露面了，下屬的五個分段都描寫的是從紐約沒落的物質主義走嚮理想化的西方，從現在走嚮過去(以及未來)的形象。在這個過程中，主人公玻卡洪達斯的情人融為一體。通過他在火刑柱上的犧牲，他獲得了新生，以進行精神上的旅行：“包裹在那堆火中，我看見更多的守護人醒來／——忽隱忽現，疾跑上山棱象一股潮流。”
第三段《短袍》講到十九世紀開往中國的那種快速帆船：“劈波斬浪，船底開出緑色的草地／鎖在風的機靈裏，它們都嚮東方行駛。”第四段主要是寫飛行員是水手的接班人：“穿過明亮的晴空、展開着，未曾睡眠／翅膀剪裁着光明最後的邊緣。”
第五段中有以女人，即“美國的身體”為主題的《三首歌》。第六段《貴格山》用的是自傳性的材料，哀嘆新英格蘭精神的沒落：“這裏曾是‘希望之鄉’。”
在《隧洞》中，嚮地獄的沉降象徵性地描繪為嚮紐約地下鐵道的沉降。“誰的頭顱在鼓起的鐵條上搖擺？誰的身體沿着老鐵軌冒煙？”受折磨的靈魂也同樣因為是紐約的市民而受到詛咒，天天經受着常規的侮辱。這一段的結尾模仿了艾略特：
我們極度痛苦的吻，你聚集，
呵，火之子
聚集——
這首詩嚮外部摸索前進，走到了露天中，而且在最後一段《阿特蘭提斯》中，大橋完工了：
呵，你鋼化了的認識，它的跨越
投入雲雀回歸的靈巧區域；
在它繩索可及的範圍內
成雙成對地在單個的蝶蛹中歌唱…………
由於《大橋》力圖達到史詩效果，所以它一直是英文中最難懂的一首詩。雖然它有缺陷，特別是經過一段難産期後，哈特剋萊思努力寫成的某些段落，如《印地安納》、《哈特拉斯角》和《貴格山》，理想主義和樂觀主義的狂喜往往很有力，儘管有時很牽強。在美國詩歌中很難找出與之匹敵的對手。這是一部有缺陷的傑作。史詩和浪漫的衝動似乎有分歧。這首詩的長度衹彳卜一千行，缺陷是嚴重的：晦澀、矯揉造作，也許在不自然的樂觀主義中有某種程度的不誠實。但是一經朗讀，這首詩在節奏上便有那種理想式的雄心勃勃的張力，還有對這一嘗試的價值的堅定信念。
——一首歌，一座火之橋：是中國嗎，
此時憐憫沉浸着青草，長虹套住了
那條蛇， 雄鷹在葉子間………？
應答輪唱的低語在天空中搖曳。
剋萊思在他生命的最後兩年中幾乎再沒有寫出什麽詩來，《大橋》把他的精力消耗殆盡了。不過《破裂的塔》提出了一個尖銳的問題。
我傾吐了我的話語。然而它是否同義語
記載着那個空中法庭的君主
其股為大地鍍上銅色，在傷痕裏寫下
適澈的聖諭，曾發誓給於希望一一卻變成了絶望？
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[1]美國超驗主義者梭羅實踐他超驗主義理想的地方。——譯者
[2] 蒙太祖馬(montczuma： 1466—1520)墨西哥印地安酋長。西班牙徵服該地時被俘，復王位後被同族人殺死。——譯註
[3] 古羅馬詩人維吉爾的著名史詩。——譯註
[4] 傳說中曾在直布羅陀大西洋西部存在過的島嶼或陸地。——譯註
[5] 玻卡洪達斯： (1595--1617)美國印地安人酋長玻哈坦的女兒。據說曾援救過英國殖民主義老約翰．史密斯．後與一白人成親。——譯註
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作者：瓊斯 翻譯：湯潮 錄校：lixiaoshi 製作：惡人𠔌珠樓 轉貼請註明
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
編輯者: hello