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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. 21. remaining constant within the complex periphrasis of the text. An example will make this point clearer. It is a striking instance of ungrammaticality in Crane, one which stumps even so perceptive a reader as R. W. B. Lewis. The passage I have chosen is the distich that concludes

"Voyages IV" (38): In this expectant, still exclaim receive The secret oar and petals of all love.

The source of the difficulty of these two lines, says Lewis, is a misplaced comma and a missing conjunction:

One can move the words around experimentally; but they are curiously inert and heavy counters. I suppose "still" to be the noun intended, and the comma to be misplaced, and_read it: "In this expectant still, exclaim / a n ^ receive," etc. In any event, it is plainly a moment of final celebration, and the gift of the symbols of universal love.' It is unusual that a critic would go so far as to rewrite a line to rationalize an ungrammaticality, but the line as it stands does seem to cry out for some modification to be understood. The modification, however, need not be made in the line itself, but in our perception of it.

What Lewis lacks to justify his reading is a more comprehensive idea of textual unity such as that provided by the matrix. Aware of Crane's propensity for employing adjectival or verbal forms as nouns (and vice versa).

7 Lewis, p. 168. Lewis understandably surmises that "still" should be read as a shorthand version of "stillness," a decision which leads him to require a compound imperative--"exclaim and receive"— and the repositioning of an intruding comma to make sense of the line. Without doing any violence whatsoever to the text, however, he could have read "exclaim" as an abbreviated form of "exclamation," just as, in the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge (104), we read "annoy" as shorthand for "annoyance” in the third line of the second stanza:

We, who with pledges taste the bright annoy Of friendship's acid wine . . .

This verb-as-noun reading would receive some support by virtue of its recurrence in the canon, but the "Voyages" text itself supplies all the confirmation we need. Besides asking why it would be necessary for the beloved addressed in the poem to exclaim as well as receive (somewhat odd, mimetically), we must observe how "exclaim" derives from the poem's underlying matrix.

In this case, the matrix sentence could be cast as "I celebrate my love for you"; the model for its actualization in the text is the offering of the poem itself as a symbol of that love. Hence, "exclaim" serves as a metonym for the entire poem, its verb-as-noun duality enforcing the idea of the poem as an ecstatic act of speech, a cry or lover's plea that is at the same time a verbal icon, an offering to the beloved. Syntactically, the word "exclaim" occupies the same position as the phrase, "incarnate word," in the first of the two prepositional phrases that conclude the poem; In signature of the incarnate word

In this expectant, still exclaim

This repetition emphasizes the semantic parallelism between "incarnate word” and "exclaim," both words joining other metonyms for the poem in the entire "Voyages" sequence; "wrapt inflections" and "scrolls of silver snowy sentences" (II); "silken skilled transmemberment of song" (III);

"clear rime" (V), a pun repeated in "Atlantis" (115); and "petalled word," "imaged Word," and "unbetrayable reply" (VI). Moreover, the adjectives "expectant" and "still" would ordinarily modify the poet, not the poem, but the transferral of meaning from poet to poem ("exclaim") strengthens the identification of the lover with his gift, the poem. "Exclaim” is especially appropriate in this context, promoting as it does the "incarnation" theme which energizes "Voyages" and, as we shall see later, much of

Crane's other poetry; here, "exclaim” as a noun is the "incarnation" of the act of exclaiming, an action which becomes an object— the poem itself.

My point here has been not simply to correct another critic's misreading, but to suggest how a puzzling feature of a literary text may be interpreted as a derivation from or transformation of an initial given. Its strangeness becomes the marker of the transformational process itself insofar as it intensifies the reader's search for the rule governing its integration within the totality of the text. This rule, as expressed by the matrix, is of course hypothetical, arrived at through a mode of inference C. S. Peirce termed "abduction." As explained by Peirce, abduction "substitutes, for a complicated tangle of predicates, a single conception," his example being the effect of unity we experience with a piece of music:

..,the various sounds made by the instruments of an orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion, quite distinct from the sounds themselves. In performing abduction, we invent an alleged general rule to account for an uncoded or under-coded context; abduction is a metalinguistic operation which generates a sign- function, that is, a correlation between a content unit (the uncoded context) and an expression unit (the hypotheti­ cal rule).^ TVhen we interpret a literary text, it is through abductive inference that we postulate a matrix that is seen to generate a set of successive articulations, each of them actualizing some of the semantic potentialities of its source. The evolution of the catachresis embodied by

p Quoted in Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 132 Q Cf. Eco, p. 131; also p. 49. 10

the text is an attempt to exhaust the possibilities of a single paradigm. This approach, to use the distinction of

Gerald Bruns in Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language. endorses the notion of a text as a "making," not a

" s a y i n g "10. the original creative "making" is recapitulated,

at another level, by the backward and forward abductive movement of the hermeneutic endeavor— from text to matrix,

from matrix to text. This view of textual structure is, in some respects, similar to the one put forth by John M. Ellis in The Theory

of Literary Criticism, where structure is defined as "the

most general principle of organization which binds together

and makes sense of all the detail of a text in combina­ tion."H Riffaterre's description of semiosis, however,

realigns the emphasis from the text’s organization to its

generation, asserting that the multiplicity of predications within a text are entailed, pressuposed, or implied in or by the inherently simple matrix. Indeed, the variations

and transformations of the matrix represent the systematic unfolding of its repressed semantic "encyclopedia." This unfolding may be illustrated by examining the first stanza

Gerald L. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven and London* Yale University Press, 1974), p. 235.

John M. Ellis, The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 206. 11

of "The Harbor Dawn" in The Bridge (54) i

Insistently through sleep— a tide of voices— They meet you listening mid-way in your dream. The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises: Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails. Far strum of foghorns . . . signals dispersed in veils.

The mimesis in these lines is "awakening at dawn in a seaport," but the text's stress is upon the muffled noises that greet the listener "Insistently through sleep." The accumulation of adjectival phrases contributes almost nothing to the simple descriptive effectiveness of the passage. Even when we consider the text metaphorically, we

may be uneasy about the "Far strum of foghorns,” despite its accuracy in denoting how a foghorn might sound to a

person on shore; "strum" is the verb (in noun form here) used in connection with the plucking of a stringed

instrument, not with the rumbling blare of a foghorn. The metaphorical link, however, is adumbrated by another sort of textual appropriateness. The word "strum," in pre­ supposing a stringed instrument, brings to the surface its seme "harp," which along with the surplices, shrouds, and veils "worn" by the noises is a conventional constituent of the semantic representation (sememe) of the term, "religious ceremony." Strum is consistent with the other elements of the ceremonial vocabulary used to "describe" the early morning sounds. It is generated by a matrix which calls for the awakening of the poet and his beloved to be equated with 12

a religious experience, the "logic" of that matrix superceding that of the vraisemblable. The harp presupposed by "strum" is undoubtedly the Brooklyn Bridge itself, addressed in the opening section as "0 harp and altar, of the fury fused" (46), and metamorphosized into a transcendent harp in "Atlantis" (114-117). It is by means of such ungrammaticalities that we are situated in The

Bridge's symbolic landscape, a landscape revealed through the reader's praxis of these semiotic transformations.

II. THE TEXTUAL LOGIC OF THE BRIDGE

Just as the previous passage from "The Harbor Dawn" follows the textual logic of its matrix, so too the whole of The Bridge may be seen as a series of partial actualiza­ tions of a single semantic structure. While I am inclined to think that all of Crane's work could be shown to derive from one matrix, I shall limit myself here to tracing the skeletal outlines of a textual logic motivating his major work. The Bridge. To work our way back to the matrix of a poetic sequence as diverse and expansive as The Bridge, we must first note that the two principal models generated

1 ? Riffaterre would refer to "strum" as a "dual sign." "The dual sign is an equivocal word situated at the point where two sequences of semantic or formal associations intersect" (p. 86). 13

by the matrix are 1) the hymn of praise and 2) the prayer of supplication or exhortation. The first of these models resembles what Riffaterre would call a "conversion rule."^^

I am using the word in a somewhat different sense from his; my "rule of praise" is the guarantor for the positive orientation of every element in a poem. It is, in most instances, a constraint upon irony, short-circuiting the

"conversion" of semantic markers which can result when a positive term is modified by a negative context (or the reverse). In The Bridge, the dominant markers are all positive, consistent with the pre-transformation state of the matrix; it is in this sense that the poem frequently conveys the high seriousness of a rite of worship. Similarly, the second model resembles, in Riffaterre's terminology, an "expansion rule," reformulating the prayer- model demanded by the matrix in expanded, more complex derivations. The rule of praise and the rule of prayer function together in The Bridge as constants which represent the distinct features of the matrix. They "repeatedly actualize one or more of the semes of the word capable of summarizing or symbolizing the matrix"!^, in The Bridge.

13 Cf. Riffaterre, pp. 47-80. "Conversion transforms the constituents of the matrix sentence by modifying them all with the same factor" (p. 63). "Expansion transforms the constituents of the matrix sentence into more complex forms" (p. 48). Riffaterre, p. 75. 14

that word is "incarnation." It is perhaps misleading to distinguish too sharply between these two rules in connection with The Bridge, where their roles are less explicitly delineated than in other works by Crane. The rule of praise, for example, can be seen in isolation in a poem like "The Air Plant"

(168). What begins as a pseudo-botanical description of the bulbous air plant concludes with a series of three exclamations signaling its apotheosis as a hurricane; the poem is a near-perfect example of Crane's inability to introduce anything into his text without discovering some way to praise it. Here, the rule of praise transforms the humble air plant into a hurricane through the agency of their shared seme, "air," which in the poem is associated with "nothingness" and absence:

But this,— defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood. Almost no shadow— but the air's thin talk. The marginal existence of the air plant— whose paradoxical name establishes the tangible vs. intangible opposition which structures the transformation— is the absence that is filled by the abundant presence of the hurricane. Extreme lack gives way to extreme potency (in compliance with the behavior of polar opposites), the destructiveness of the hurricane contrasting with the helplessness of the air plant. So strong is the impulse to praise in Crane that a word whose defining features are negations is thrust 15

unexpectedly into a triumphant context.

In a similar manner, the rule of prayer may be said to account for the significance of the imperative mood in Crane, the speaker in many of his poems imploring, seeking, or willing some form of communion with a nameless Absolute.

"To the Cloud Juggler" (159) humorously identifies this Absolute whose concern is so often solicited in Crane

(perhaps most effectively in "Voyages" (37), where the speaker's beloved embodies ideal, almost divine, love: "Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . . ."). "To the Cloud Juggler" is explicitly marked by its title and dedication ("In Memoriam: Harry Crosby") as a devotional text whose subject is the death of a friend (Crane's publisher at Black Sun Press, who committed suicide). The rule of prayer generates a series of exhortations celebrating the infinite power of Crane's God-equivalent— Expose vaunted validities that yawn Past pleasantries . . . Assert the ripened dawn As you have yielded balcony and room Or tempests— in a silver, floating plume

— but at the same time urging It to intervene with care in human affairs:

Wrap us and lift us; drop us, then, returned Like water, undestroyed,— like mist, unburned . . . But do not claim a friend like him again. Whose arrow must have pierced you beyond pain.

The poem's matrix— here, I would hypothesize "consolation for the living" or somesuch— is expanded by a succession 16

of imperatives (disclose, guide, expose, assert, wrap, lift, drop). The final imperative, the negative command

"do not claim," makes Crosby into the exemplary exception, his positive valorization reinforced by the divine vs. human opposition which collapses in the final line. The elegiac praise that is the text's purpose becomes a prayer of supplication based on the model, "Do whatever you like, with one exception..."; prayer and praise at this point are fused as they are in The Bridge, where the vocabularies of supplicant and celebrant merge into one.

In fact, we find Crane in the posture of supplicant and celebrant in the opening stanzas of The Bridge. This posture represents an appropriate verbal behavior for the poet's confrontation with the ultimate semiotic mystery.

Word made flesh. Here (46), the Brooklyn Bridge is seen as the "incarnation" of a verbal trinity,

...the prophet's pledge. Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—

— spanning the distance between the divine and human, ideal and real, spiritual and physical, etc. In this sense. The Bridge stands in hypogrammatic relation to the Christian story of the Incarnation, the latter a parallel "text" generated by the same semantic core but covering different ground on the shared semantic field.In adapting the

15 Cf. Riffaterre, pp. 23-46. A hypogram is a pre­ existent word group (potential or actual) to which a text may refer. 17

language of Christian worship to his own ends. Crane establishes an intertextual dependence between the two derivative sequences. While Crane's poem focuses upon a piece of architecture rather than a Christ-figure, the difference is but a mimetic distortion of the underlying matrix. For the language of incarnation is the language of paradox, as it is in the Bridge's first appearance in the poem: And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced As though the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! This oxymoronic formulation is recapitulated throughout these beginning stanzas, the terms of the opposition varying among ascent vs. descent (seagull and elevator), stillness vs. motion ("Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still"), and most importantly, freedom vs. limitation, which through intertextual reference to the Christian myth is the synechdoche for the crucial paradoxes of incarnation: the co-presence of time and eternity, mortality and immortality, omnipotence and vulnerability. Word and flesh.

The Bridge compels Crane's praise because, like Christ, it is the nexus or intersection of a series of polar oppositions which, instead of cancelling each other out, are simultaneously asserted. The rapture elicited by this symbolic juncture—

0 harp and altar, of the fury fused. 18

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

— yields in the final stanza to the prayer for a "myth" equal to the "Unfractioned idiom," the absolute Word, embodied in the Bridge itself: Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God. Addressed thusly, the Bridge becomes Crane's muse, but it is also his subject, and the "myth" that follows in the remaining sections traces the "curveship" of its paradoxical semantic space, in which contradictions are joined just as Manhattan and Brooklyn are joined by the Bridge. The poem as a whole is structured around metonyms of this central symbol, the "incarnation" matrix transforming each mimesis into a prayer of praise.

The grandiose Te Deum at the conclusion of "Ave Maria" (51) is one of the best examples of this transforma­ tion. The Christian God of Columbus is explicitly addressed and His creation praised. Significantly, the focus of this hymn is the corposant. a word which here serves as a dual sign referring both to a corona light- effect produced by electrical charges over the ocean and to its etymological meaning, "holy body":

Who sendest greeting by the corposant. And Teneriffe's garnet— flamed it in a cloud. Urging through night our passage to the Chan;— Te Deum laudamus for thy teeming span.

"Corposant" refers to two texts, one mimetic and the other 19

symbolic, one the representation of a phenomenon familiar to sailors, the other the descriptive system of Christian mythology and Incarnation. The "circle" seme activated by the "corona" text yields the whirling, gyrating vocabulary: "sapphire wheel," "orbic wake," "holy rings," etc. Its principal derivation, however, is the "kindled Crown" of the godhead, whose "holy body" is manifested in the form of a celestial dance of lights: "Elohim, still I hear thy sounding heel!" The revelation of the deity as a body is continued in "brows unhooded now," "brows" having been culled from the lexicon of the "corona" text (as the place where the Crown is worn) as well as the "holy body" text (as the corporeal locus of spiritual illumination).

Completing this "incarnation" is the epithet, "O Thou Hand of Fire," which actualizes two prominent semes from both "corposant" texts and reiterates the initial paradox of the deity's substantial insubstantiality, its physical spirituality.

The "Hand of Fire" reappears in "The Tunnel" (112), its presence here motivated by the rule of praise that operates consistently throughout The Bridge. The night­ marish subway ride recounted in this poem is the daemonic counterpoint to the affirmative assertions of the symbolic

Bridge. Contributing to the Grand Guignol atmosphere of "The Tunnel" is the resurrected person of Edgar Allan Poe 20

(110), Whose body smokes along the bitten rails. Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind In back forks of the chasms of the brain. The heavy-handed punning that this "dark night of the soul" context encourages— For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street. The platform hurries along to a dead stop.

— is meliorated by the introduction of a positive resurrection figure, Lazarus. Lazarus dissolves the life vs. death opposition developed in the poem by paradoxically embodying both terms; the intertextual reference is to the

Christian doctrine of life after death as guaranteed by the redemptive suffering of Jesus: "Word that will not die!" The rule of praise magnetizes the poem toward a positive picture, though the mimesis of "The Tunnel" is more self­ consciously despairing than anywhere else in The Bridge.

Hence, its "agony” occurs as a "kiss" and not, for example, a "cry," which is excluded by Crane's textual logic. The logic is the same at the end of "Quaker Hill" (105-105), where the poet asks.

Must we descend as worm's eye to construe Our love of all we touch, discovering that the answer is yes, that even suffering is valuable and praiseworthy. The perversion of ideals parodied throughout the poem— the New Avalon Hotel of the fifth stanza is an emblem for the commercial exploitation 21

of the dream of an earthly paradise— is magnanimously accepted as a part of life that unhusks the heart of fright, Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields That patience that is armour and that shields Love from despair. This willed triumph of love over despair repeats the "love" theme woven throughout The Bridge and betokens the

Christian intertext, in which the incarnate deity "saves" mankind as a gesture of divine love. The human reciprocation of this love is devotion, represented in "The River" and "The Dance" as a striving after spiritual and physical communion with the godhead.

Pocahontas is the incarnation metonym in these two poems; her presence is associated with the return to an enduring first principle, an absolute and eternal purity which is nevertheless engaged within the temporal order. The repressed incarnation matrix surfaces first in "The River" (66), where the American landscape is described in terms that subvert the mimesis while revealing the "body" of the incarnate Pocahontas;

— They know a body under the wide rain; Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates With racetrack jargon,— dotting immensity They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue—

But I knew her body there. Time like a serpent down her shoulder, dark. And space, an eaglet's wing, laid on her hair. 22

This "geographical" body is transformed into an "actual" body in "The Dance" (73-75), in which the poet’s quest for the godhead is consummated in a ritual dance of sexual possession. Two idiolectic symbols— the serpent represent­ ing time, the eagle space— recur at the conclusion of "The Dance" (and again in the final stanza of "Atlantis," 117) to emphasize the mystery of incarnation, which in light of the extreme conflict implicit in its semantic structure, achieves equilibrium through the tension of its oppositions. It is this poise that is singled out for praise in the silent "hosannas" that close "The River" (69) and the totem-tableau— "The serpent with the eagle in the boughs"— in the last line of "The Dance" (75).

Praise of a somewhat different nature is found for the "flesh" of the burlesque dancer who appears in "National Winter Garden" (100-101), the central panel of the "Three Songs" triptych. The rule of praise in this instance converts the poet’s revulsion toward debased, exhibitionistic sexuality into muted acceptance, following the pattern of "Quaker Hill" and "The Tunnel." "Magdalene"

(101) refers once more to the Christian intertext, here denoting the purifying effects of divine grace. The entire

"Three Songs" sequence may, indeed, be seen as an encapsulated blazon of the Christian Incarnation text.

Three women central to the Incarnation myth structure the 23

series, beginning with "Eve" of "Southern Cross" (98-99), whose "original sin"— "Light drowned the lithic trillion of your spawn"— is redeemed by Christ's death on the Cross.

"Magdalene" of "National Winter Garden" is the forgiven sinner, "Mary" of "Virginia" (102) the agent of salvation, the Mother of God. It is important to notice that in

"Virginia" the mimesis situates us squarely in New York City ("Spring in Prince Street": the "nickel-dime tower" is the Woolworth Building) despite the seeming contradiction of the title. This conflict at the mimetic level is resolved at the semiotic level, the text celebrating the virginity of Mary in accordance with the governing incarnation matrix. That matrix is also responsible for the ecstatic meditation upon Walt Whitman that occurs in "Cape Hatteras" (93-95). It was Whitman who, in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Stood up and flung the span on even wing Of that great Bridge, our myth, whereof I sing, and in keeping with his kinship to the Bridge, Whitman becomes another of its metonyms, as the paradoxical epithet identifying him— "Panis Angelicas." angelic bread— indicates. The movement in this poem reverses the incarnation matrix, which here generates its own semantic opposite, apotheosis;

Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread And read thee by the aureole 'round thy head Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicas! 24

Corresponding to Whitman's deification is his seeming re-incarnation in the poetic persona presented by Crane, their "living brotherhood" as much the result of a shared vision ("thy vision is reclaimed") as of a shared body:

"And this, thine other hand, upon my heart." The epigraph to "Cape Hatteras," from Whitman's "Passage to India," enables us to discover the textual motivation for this merger of identities.16 the Whitman text, the celebra­ tory speaker claims that "Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish'd and compacted by the true son of

God, the poet." The equation of the two poets with the "son of God" must be seen as a function both of the incarnation matrix and an intertextual reference to Whitman's poem.

The poet as "son of God" becomes the subject of Crane's panegyric; the praise takes the form of a rainbow rising above the "ghoul-mound" of the Cape Hatteras graveyard, a rainbow which crowns Whitman with an aureole that, in addition to being a metaphor for the Bridge, further develops the "corona" theme of "Ave Maria."

A final variant of the matrix emerges in "Atlantis" (114-117). The Bridge itself reappears for the first time since the invocation, although transmogrified in this section into a harp whose "white choiring strings" produce

R. W. B. Lewis mentions the Whitman poem (p. 239) to make a considerably different point. 25

the music accompanying the poet's exultant hymn of praise.

The association between Atlantis and music is established earlier by the punning song title in "Cutty Sark" (83)— "ATLANTIS ROSE." That link places Crane, already identified as "the true son of God, the poet," in the role of "praise- singer," his "song" played on "orphie strings" re-enacting the mystery of the incarnation he celebrates: ...translating time Into what multitudinous Verb the suns And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast In myriad syllables. ..

The "multitudinous Verb" metaphorically names poetry itself, for not surprisingly the Bridge-harp is Aeolean, the cliche Romantic symbol for poetic creation:

Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream As though a god were issue of the strings . . .

Both the Bridge and the poetic sequence that valorizes it are manifestations of a perfect, timeless order, "Forever Deity's glittering Pledge." And, just as the Incarnation and Ascension of the second person of the Trinity confirm the promise of everlasting life in the Christian intertext (note how the poem insists upon the upward, aspiring movement of the Bridge: from incarnation to ascension, the paradigm is now exhausted), so too the Bridge authenticates the possibility of absolute experience born of temporal limits:

Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time's realm As love strikes clear direction for the helm. 26

The concerns of The Bridge, then, are shaped by an underlying structure, a matrix that can be summarized in a single word, "incarnation." This structure's influence is

far more pervasive than I have indicated here, and a more detailed study might suggest how it integrates many other elements of Crane's work, as for example the inevitable

linking of love and divinity, his obsession with the "new,"

or the dominance of "white" on his verbal spectrum. The perspective implied by this approach considers each poem a

partial realization of an active paradigm, each obeying the laws laid down by a "logic of metaphor" that animates and

controls the text. For Crane, that logic resonates within a system of preoccupations centering upon a supreme mystery which, as testimony to its power, repeatedly evokes expressions of wonder and awe. Crane is a truly religious

poet, not because of any doctrinal orthodoxy on his part, but because, in his earnest praise of and exhortations to his Absolute, his poems read like articles of faith. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry and Letters Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1966. Lewis, Thomas S. W., ed. Letters of Hart Crane and his Family. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1974. Parkinson, Thomas, ed. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Weber, Brom, ed. The Letters of Hart Crane. 1916-1932. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.

Criticism

Arpad, Joseph J. "Hart Crane's Platonic Myth: The Brooklyn Bridge." American Literature 39 (1967), pp. 75-86. Blackmur, R. P. Form and Value in Modern Poetry. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957.

. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952.

Brown, Susan Jenkins. Robber Rocks : Letters and Memories of Hart Crane. 1923-1932. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. Cambon, Glauco. The Inclusive Flame. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Clark, David R. "Hart Crane's Technique." Texas Studies in Language and Literature 5 (1963), pp. 389-397.

Coffman, Stanley K., Jr. "Symbolism in The Bridge." PMLA 66 (March 1951), pp. 65-77.

27 28

Combs, Robert. The Vision of the Voyage: Hart Crane and the Psychology of Romanticism. Memphis, Tennessee: Memphis State University Press, 1978. Dembo, L. S. Conceptions of Reality in Modern Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956. . Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1960. Herman, Barbara. "The Language of Hart Crane." Sewanee Review 58 (January-February 1950), pp. 52-67.

Horton, Philip. Hart Crane: The Life of a Poet. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1937. Lane, Gary, ed. A Concordance to the Poems of Hart Crane. New York; Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1972. Leibowitz, Herbert A. Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1968. Lewis, R. W. B. The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968. Paul, Sherman. Hart's Bridge. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Pearce, Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, New Jersey; Princeton University Press, 1961.

Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta. "The Poetics of Hart Crane." Perspective 4 (Spring 1951), pp. 81-88.

Riddel, Joseph. "Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure." Journal of English Literary History 33 (1966), pp. 473-496. Schwartz, Delmore. "Raw Genius, Self-delusion, and Incanta­ tion." Partisan Review 15 (October 1968), pp. 1135- 1136.

Slote, Bernice. "The Structure of Hart Crane's The Bridge." University of Kansas City Review 24 (March 1958), pp. 225-238.

. "Transmutation in Crane's Imagery in The Bridge." Modern Language Notes 123 (January 1958), pp. 15-23. 29

Spears, Monroe K. Hart Crane. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1965.

Stauffer, Donald B. A Short History of American Poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1974.

Sugg, Richard P. Hart Crane * s The Bridge. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1976.

Tate, Allen. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. Trachtenberg, Allan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Unterecker, John. "The Architecture of The Bridge." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3 (Spring-Summer 1962), pp. 5-20. . Voyager; A Life of Hart Crane. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1969. Uroff, Margaret Dickie. Hart Crane: The Patterns of his Poetry. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Weber, Brom. Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study. New York: Bodley Press, 1948.

Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. New York: Swallow Press and William Morrow and Company, 1947.

S emiotics/Methodology

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd. edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

• The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

.• S/Z. trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. 30

Bouissac, Paul. Circus and Culture; A Semiotic Approach» Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press, 1976. Bruns, Gerald L. Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language » New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Ellis, John M. The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Approach. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Greimas, A. J., ed. Sign. Language. Culture. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Hawkes, Terence Structura1ism and Semiotics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.

Hendricks, William 0. Essays in Semiolinguisties and Verbal Art. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Jakobson, Roman. "Language in Relation to Other Communica­ tion Systems," in Selected Writings. Vol. II, pp. 697-708. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Lucid, Daniel P., ed. Soviet Semiotics. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

Morris, Charles. Writings on the General Theory of Signs. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Nowottny, Winnifred. The Language Poets Use. London: The Athlone Press, 1965.

Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978. 31

Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. A Profusion of Signs. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Segre, Cesare. Semiotics and Literary Criticism, trans. John Meddemmen. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969.