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Mingling Incantations": Hart Crane's Neo-Symbolist Poetics

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Mingling Incantations "Mingling Incantations": Hart Crane's Neo-Symbolist Poetics by Christopher A. Tidwell A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Richard Dietrich, Ph.D. John Hatcher, Ph.D. Roberta Tucker, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 31, 2006 Keywords: french symbolism, symbolist poetry, modern poetry, influence, metaphor © Copyright 2006 , Christopher A. Tidwell Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction: The Symbolist Aesthetic 1 Chapter One: Hart Crane and His Literary Critics 29 Chapter Two: T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Literary Influence 110 Chapter Three: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Crane 133 Chapter Four: Mallarmé and Crane’s Neo-Symbolist Poetics 148 Works Cited 164 Bibliography 177 About the Author End Page i “Mingling Incantations”: Hart Crane’s Neo-Symbolist Poetics Christopher A. Tidwell ABSTRACT The largest impediment to appreciating Hart Crane as a symbolist modern American poet derives from the fragmentary critical attention paid to his borrowings from and familiarity with French Symbolists like Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Almost equally important, the early career of T. S. Eliot exerted a profound impact on Crane’s poetic development and indeed served as the primary introduction to many nineteenth-century French poets for Crane and many other American poets of his generation. This dissertation initially examines contemporary critical definitions of the symbolist method and explores the extent to which Hart Crane’s familiarity with the French language helped shape his exposure to writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. A reading of Crane’s “Black Tambourine,” a self-professed “Baudelairesque thing,” indicates the dissertation’s general approach by showing how Crane’s poems evolve as “mingling incantations,” as artistic blendings interfused by the aesthetics of the major French Symbolist poets. After presenting a historical overview and critique of the critical reception given to Crane as a symbolist, the rest of the dissertation interrogates the relationship of Crane to Eliot and their views on literary influence; examines the connections between Crane, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud; and finally explores the theoretical affinities between Mallarmé and Crane’s formulation of a neo-symbolist poetics. ii Introduction: The Symbolist Aesthetic The initial impetus for my dissertation derives from the first sentence of an essay by Allen Tate written shortly after Hart Crane’s death: “The career of Hart Crane will be written by future critics as a chapter in the neo-symbolist movement” (“Hart Crane” 310). Tate’s prophesied chapter never materialized, though many subsequent critics have produced scattered and fragmentary accounts of Crane’s indebtedness to the French Symbolist poets of the nineteenth century. This dissertation, a prolegomenon to Tate’s prophesied chapter, will demonstrate the centrality of French Symbolist poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé to Crane’s aesthetics and poetic technique, plus examine shifting theories about literary influence between Crane and his chief model, T. S. Eliot. In the broadest sense, this dissertation will synthesize and extend the corpus of previous critical commentary devoted to examining Crane’s stylistic and aesthetic affinities with the symbolists. My primary purpose is to demonstrate how symbolist poetics function as not one of several but rather as the primary shaping force on Crane’s development--most evident in his first volume, White Buildings, published in 1926. In addition, unlike most previous critical analyses, I hope to interrogate the extent to which Crane’s adoption and modification of symbolist practices affected his later poem The Bridge (1930) and the lyrics collected after his 1932 suicide for a projected volume called Key West: An Island Sheaf. 1 An important obstacle to assessing Hart Crane’s evolution as a poet lies in the diversity of critical treatment his work has received. Almost since the inception of Crane’s career, literary critics have diverged widely in their attempts to situate his poems and letters within the modernist American canon. Most strikingly, critics have reached nearly no consensus on how to characterize Crane’s achievement as an American poet. Conclusions regarding how to categorize Crane range across a wide gamut from an unlettered Midwestern “natural” genius who never finished high school to a willfully obscure metaphysical lyricist torn between conflicting American poetic traditions-- typically grouped around Poe and Whitman as major precursors. Holding up Poe and Whitman as the “major” roles available to modern American poets remains a holdover from early- and mid-century New Criticism and provides a glimpse of the critical milieu in which Crane was appreciated initially. Critical responses to The Bridge in particular have suffered from simplistic readings which overemphasize a supposedly naive Whitmanian affirmation of modern life. T. S. Eliot’s 1953 speech “American Literature and Language” traces modern poetry’s birth from the exhausted ash-heap of “the tail-end of the Victorian era,” and asserts, “In the nineteenth century, Poe and Whitman stand out as solitary international figures” (To Criticize 58-59). John Unterecker, Crane’s most thorough biographer and one of the poet’s most perceptive critics, invokes the same two figures in a discussion of the poetic precursors balanced and invoked in The Bridge: since he is an artist, Crane fits into his poem, too, the oppositions which almost every artist is conscious of: the vision of art that is democratic, open, and objective and which Crane identifies with Whitman; and its 2 counterpart and opposite, an art that is intensely personal, secret, subjective--the art of the symbolist tradition which Crane associates with Poe. (“Architecture” 95) Although many critics position Poe (as godfather or role model of the French Symbolists) and Whitman as Crane’s primary artistic forefathers in The Bridge, the first to do so prominently was Yvor Winters in a review of The Bridge: “[Crane] possesses the greatest genius in the Whitmanian tradition, and . strangely enough, he grafts onto the Whitmanian tradition something of the stylistic discipline of the Symbolists” (Uncollected 76). After a review of relevant criticism in chapter one, a fuller discussion of the complex triangulation of Eliot, Crane, and the literary climate of the reception accorded them will occur in chapter two, but at this point one need simply note the absence of Dickinson and Melville from Eliot’s list of “international” nineteenth-century American poets despite the rediscovery in the late teens and twenties of these neglected writers. Marginalized today in the modernist canon like these nineteenth-century writers were in the earliest part of the twentieth century, Crane saw fit to write poems honoring Dickinson and Melville, a form of homage never paid by the other significant modern American poets Eliot mentions (he lists Crane with Pound, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Cummings, Ransom, and Tate). In many ways, the various descriptions of Crane’s poetic career seem dazzlingly incongruous and include, in addition to these aforementioned characterizations, identifying him as the misguided heir of Emerson and Whitman (Winters), as a mystic overburdened with religious inclinations (Munson and Hanley), as the last great 3 Romantic in the Dionysian vein (Spears), as an American Futurist/Cubist valorizing industrial machinery (Paul), as a master of Marlovian blank verse in the grand manner who lacked a suitable theme (Gross), as an overly “personal” lyricist who misguidedly tried to fashion a cultural epic on the idea of “America” (Blackmur), as a prototype of the homosexual artist excluded as perennial outcast from the cultural mainstream (Martin and Yingling), as a belated modernist trapped in the shadow of T.S. Eliot (Tate), or even as the “Cleveland Rimbaud” intent on the dérèglement de tous les sens through stimuli such as alcohol, tobacco, and loud music (Cowley and Galpin). The sheer variety of these different approaches toward classifying the poet calls to mind Crane’s own description of Nietzsche at the end of his first published prose review: “think of being so elusive,--so mercurial, as to be first swallowed whole, then coughed up, and still remain a mystery!” (CPSLP 198). With regard to verse technique, however, many contemporary critics probably would concur with Warner Berthoff in dividing Crane’s career into three major phases: an early Imagist apprenticeship beginning in 1916 and culminating in 1922, a middle phase of full maturity heavily influenced by symbolist sensibilities running from 1923 until early 1926, and a third period spent trying to position himself as the epic bard of America via The Bridge lasting from mid-1926 until 1930. The critical lineage of this standard chronology of Crane’s career stretches over almost the whole of Crane’s critical reception, commencing with the early analyses by Munson and Tate. The tripartite scheme is implicit in Tate’s 1926 introduction to White Buildings wherein he confides that “To the Imagists Crane doubtless went to school in poetry,” and then anticipates The Bridge by claiming “If the energy of Crane’s vision never quite reaches a sustained 4 maximum, it is because he has not found a suitable theme” (Introduction 52-53). Subsequent encodings of this imagist-symbolist-epic
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