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Universiw Micrdfilms International 300 N INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or notations which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or “target” for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is “Missing Page(s)”. If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure you of complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark it is an indication that the film inspector noticed either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, or duplicate copy. 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UniversiW Micrdfilms International 300 N. 2EEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND 7918506 BRITTONt DONALD EUGENE WRAPT INFLECTIONS: HART CRANE'S POETICS OF PRAISE. THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, PH.D., 1979 Universi^ M iom lm s International soon, zeeb road, ann arbor, mi 4sio6 WRAPT INFLECTIONS: HART CRANE'S POETICS OF PRAISE by Donald Eugene Britton Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of The American University in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literary Studies Signatures of Committee: Chairman: '/pK vAn Àkit Dean pf the Colle Date 1979 The American University Washington, D. C. 20016 THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY r/ CONTENTS I. Setniosis and the "Logic of M e t a p h o r " ...............1 II. The Textual Logic of The B r i d g e....................12 Selected Bibliography ................................. 27 I. SEMIOSIS AND THE "LOGIC OF METAPHOR" One of the unexamined notions of Crane criticism has been his concept of the "logic of metaphor." Although other modern poets, notably Eliot^, have invoked such an idea to explain the ambiguous behavior of poetic language, readers of Crane have used it to excuse or apologize for the strangeness of his idiolect rather than to elucidate the poetry. In his Poetry of Hart Crane; A Critical Study. R. W. B. Lewis, one of Crane's major interpreters, speaks of "the mounting pressure begotten by such inter-animating clusters" and of words which "rush toward one another" to create an "absolute e f f e c t , but these impressionistic accounts merely describe the effect the language has on the reader, not its appropriateness or mode of operation. When a passage in Crane is particularly obscure, the critic's response is frequently to begin a discussion of the "logic of metaphor," intensifying the confusion by substituting a critical mystification for the poetic one. If the phrase is to be helpful, it must serve as more than a magic formula Eliot's phrase, however, differs from Crane's; "There is a logic of imagination as well as a logic of concepts." T. S. Eliot, Preface to Anabasis (New York; Harcourt Brace, 1949), p. 10. o R. W. B. Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study (Princeton, New Jersey; Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 144. which, when recited, dispels the difficulty of difficult verse through the conjuring of some mysterious linguistic function. Crane's original formulation of his idea, in the famous letter to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe that is now reprinted in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane^, demonstrates an understanding of poetry as a semiotic process: ... as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem. (234) For Crane, the words of a poem generate "associational meanings," which in turn generate more words, with the result that the "entire construction is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor'" (221). This "organic principle" determines the appropriateness and acceptability of otherwise deviant expressions; what appears unmotivated at the surface level of the text is in fact motivated by the "logic" governing the total structure. The semiotics of poetry defines this "logic" as the transformation of meaning into significance, the process whereby information ("meaning") communicated by the text 3 My references to Crane's poetry are to this text (New York: Anchor Books, 1956). Page numbers are noted in parentheses. comes to be perceived as a formal and semantic unity, its discrete verbal features deriving from a single semantic core. This transformational process, according to Michael Riffaterre in Semiotics of Poetry (whose theoretical method informs my investigation of Crane), constitutes semiosis. Literary semiosis may be further defined as ...the transfer of a sign from one level of discourse to another, /the/ metamorphosis of what was a signifying complex at a lower level of the text into a signifying unit, now a member of a more developed system, at a higher level of the text.'^ (My italics) The route of semiosis is from multiplicity to unity, a shift from the sequential (or syntagmatic) arrangements of words in ordinary discourse to the establishment of paradigmatic equivalences that form an invariant structure according to which the text may be interpreted. In poetry, instead of a language which purports to refer to states of affairs in the world, we have a use of language that subverts referentiality by asserting its own structures against those whose primary function is representational or mimetic. According to Riffaterre, At the mimesis level, meanings of words depend entirely upon syntax and position; they add bits of information to bits of information, and their sole common reference is at most a descriptive system that serves to distribute compatible representations along the sentence. ^ the semiotic level. contrariwise, the words repeat the same ^ Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 4. information, usually a seme, or the invariant of a thematic structure . .: all harp upon the same information. The mimetic "text" is syntagmatic, the semiotic one is paradigmatic.^ (My italics) The poetic text, in this view, exerts a counter-pressure on mimetic codes by re-organizing them to conform to the rules of its own derivation. Poetic utterance is thus unmotivated as conventional discourse but highly over­ determined as a semiotic structure. This semiotic conception of poetic language is clearly evident in Crane's discussion of the "logic of metaphor." The point cannot be stressed too strongly that by "metaphor" Crane is referring less to the use of figures and tropes in poetry than he is to the architecture of poetic composition, the combinational rules which, in determining the shape of a poem, permit and encourage certain expressions while excluding others. Crane's defense of his own methods, however, is based largely on the contention that the poet must be accorded the freedom of figuration to create "fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations" (238). In his de-coding of phrases from "At Melville's Tomb" in his letter to Harriet Monroe (236-239), he merely provides a kind of New Critical explication which is at best a translation from one mimetic code to another, from a figurative to a "literal" syntagm, this procedure ^ Riffaterre, pp. 88-89. rendering acceptable the deviant or ungrammatical expression. From a semiotic perpective, these ungrammati- calities do not exist to be explained away in this fashion, for they are the very warp and woof of poetry, the means by and through which semiosis is activated, alerting us to the transformation of a word or group of words into a poetic sign. Crane's poetry, of course, is nothing if not a compendium of those ungrammaticalities which invite us to consider it a specimen of literariness. We immediately detect a strenuous, athletic resistance of the language to the accepted modes of normal usage, that is, to the representational conventions of the literary vraisemblable. Consequently, as Riffaterre observes, in such a text "discourse seems to have its own imperative truth; the arbitrariness of language conventions seems to diminish as the text becomes more deviant and ungrammatical rather than the other way a r o u n d . "6 Departures from the norm, however, do not appear gratuitous insofar as they represent variations upon the poem's invariant structure, its matrix or semantic core. The matrix may be construed as the poem's paradigmatic axis: it guides our reading by demonstrating the equivalence at a higher level of seemingly disparate surface features, its own identity ^ Riffaterre, p.
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