 Crane is a challenge for you. He's a challenge for me as a teacher. He's a challenging poet. He challenges his reader. He challenges us and he makes invitations to us. Well, he calls to us in various ways, places demands on us. I'd like to talk about a text I am not, in fact, holding. I wonder if somebody have an RIS packet handy and I could have it in my hands. Thank you, Gene. That is the poem Legend, which is the poem placed first in Crane's first and only book of lyrics called White Buildings. It's a poem that he used to introduce himself to the reader, as it were. Why don't we use it to begin thinking about his work? As silent as a mirror is believed, reality is plunged in silence by the poem begins with a kind of riddle or enigma. And then the first person comes forward. I am not ready for repentance nor to match regrets. For the moth bends no more than the still imploring flame. It's a wonderful idea. I'm not going to repent of anything. I'm not going to regret anything. I have not bent any more, I have nothing more to regret than the flame which has drawn me, which bent as well. For the moth bends no more than the still imploring flame. And tremorous in the white falling flakes kisses our comma dash, the only worth all granting. Characteristically here for Crane there's a compressed set of images. Those tremorous white falling flakes there, well, they're almost images, aren't they, of a burnt moth, a moth that's been drawn to the flame. And then those come to be seen as here kisses. Kisses, if we unpack Crane's odd syntax, the sentence would seem to read, although it's maybe available to other constructions, kisses are tremorous in the white falling flakes. But these kisses, these kisses that are also emblems of flame and of extinction even, are the only worth all granting. That is, the only value that seems to grant all, I think. Again, those words all granting might be construed in a couple of different ways. Crane says, it is to be learned. What is to be learned? Cleaving and this burning, the kind I'm talking about, we must learn to be drawn to the flame, and we must learn to recover from the flame and renew our desires and renew our quests. It is to be learned, this cleaving and this burning, but only by the one who taught himself again. In order to do this, you've got to spend yourself repeatedly over and over again. And then he gives us other images of this kind of repeated burning twice and twice again, the smoking souvenir, bleeding Eidolon, and Eidolon is the Greek word for an image. And yet again this activity is repeated and repeated until the bright logic is one, unwispering, he returns to that initial enigmatic image, unwispering as a mirror is believed, then drop, by caustic drop, a perfect cry shall string some constant harmony, relentless caper for all those, and here we are, challenged and invited to meet him and join him, step the legend of their youth into the noon. Well, it's a hard poem, and yet there are a few, I think, simple basic ideas that it projects that are important to the poet that Crane saw himself as, and the one he wants us to receive and in a sense join. He presents himself as an unrepentant visionary, romantic, and lover, since after all these roles are all held in some association here. He talks about here a willingness that's erotic, that's aesthetic, that's spiritual, that's to exhaust oneself in the pursuit of one's desires, to spend out yourselves again and repeatedly. There is in this the promise that by doing it repeatedly, drop, by caustic drop, a kind of lyric voice will emerge that will be a perfect cry, and, despite this destruction in pain and blood, bleeding idol on, a constant that is sustained harmony will be achieved, harmony invoking, of course, more than one voice. And what is this? This is a poetic project, and it's a project that he describes as a relentless caper, a relentless caper. A caper comes from Latin, a sense of the goat that leaps. It's also a word that suggests well some kind of minor mischief. A relentless caper for all those who step the legend of their youth into the noon. And here Crane presents himself as a young person who would project all of the youthful vitality of his vision and desire into this symbolically pregnant moment that he calls the noon. It's a time very important in Crane's imagination, idiosyncratically, individually, but also in a way that alludes to noon in Emily Dickinson's poems. Dickinson being a poet that Crane shares a great deal with. The poetry of Hard Crane, well, it proposes to approach what he calls noon, which is an experience of fullness and absolute presence. Now, what does he mean he's not ready for repentance? Who, after all, has told him to repent? Who has told him he has something to regret? Repent is something that Crane heard from the culture at large in important ways. Crane is writing in the mid-twenties. We're at this point, I think this is a poem from Crane. It is post-war America. Crane sees himself as a member of a new youthful world centered in places like Greenwich Village. He sees himself as part of a young America, bound together across place by a kind of common dedication to art and to their will to free themselves from the sexual and economic disciplines that he calls in this letter that I have quoted other sentences from, it calls Puritanism. Crane is writing in an era, the era of the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition is in effect. There is a range of kinds of censorship that are a real and present threat. James Joyce's novel Ulysses has been banned from the United States shores for its obscenity. There's a way in which modernist art is mixed up with questions of sexuality. Crane got his copy of Ulysses smuggled from France, which a friend then stole. Crane is living too in a vital and nascent gay culture in New York in particular, and yet within a nation then as now that is strongly homophobic and anti-gay in all sorts of ways. Crane's insistence on his refusal to regret are assertions of his will towards forms of sexual and imaginative freedom. There are also affirmations of a romantic poetics essential to him. There's also a literary historical context for this that's important and that I think you can probably already start to guess at. Crane is a deep and a deeply ambivalent reader of The Wasteland and T.S. Eliot. He says in this letter to Gorm Munson in January 1923, there's no one writing in English who can command so much respect to my mind as Eliot. However, I take Eliot as a point of departure towards an almost complete reverse of his direction. His pessimism is amply justified in his own case. Why? I don't know. Well, Crane had his fantasies about Eliot's sexual life, I think. But I would apply as much of his ery addition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or if I must put it so in a skeptical age, ecstatic goal. I should not think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstasies were not, at odd moments and rare, a very real thing to me. I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of Blake. Blake is very important to Crane. Certainly the man has dug the ground and buried hope as deep and direfully as it can be. After this perfection of death, which is what Crane is how he's reading the Wasteland, nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind, he says. Well, Crane is reading the Wasteland and he's reading Eliot's criticism. He's responding to a series of text and I'll just show you some of what he's reading here. This is the criterion, the first place Eliot's poetry, The Wasteland, appeared. That's in October 1922, Eliot's own magazine. The first American publication of the poem was in The Dial in November 1922. And then the poem appeared in, I don't know if you can see it very well, the poem appeared in New York publication in book form as its own discreet text. When the Livrite edition of the poem was being prepared, as I mentioned last time, Eliot was asked to make the poem a little longer because after all it was a little too short, or so the story goes. And this was in part one of his motives for producing the notes to the poem. As I said last time, and this is the way the poet poem looked in America when it first appeared, and of course with just a few lines per page. Last time I called it the shortest long poem in the language. You can see the way in which it's sort of drawn out. Here's the little section I ended by talking about Death by Water. Well, as I suggested last time, Eliot's notes, and suggested, created a kind of role for the poet, where the poet was not only the creative lyric presence at the center of the poem, but was also a kind of scholar and critic of his own work, including it mastering bodies of knowledge and arranging meaning in ways that the notes emblematize. In the process, Eliot's doing a couple of things that Crane is responding to. He is establishing himself in what I described as a new role, and that's very much the role you see Eliot embodying here. That is the poet as a kind of scholar poet, a figure backed by institutional authority of various kinds. And this figure is created specifically in the Wasteland through the poems turning away from and turning against in complicated ways its own forms of romanticism, which last time I suggested were emblematized by that Drowned Phoenician sailor, Phlebus, who is a kind of figure for what the poem sacrifices, or you might say a kind of version of the self that Eliot is willing to give up. Crane, encountering the poem, I think, must have been obsessed with the section of death by water, must have been seen, must have heard Eliot talking to him when Eliot says, consider Phlebus the Phoenician sailor who was once tall and handsome as you. Crane means to reassert the power of youth, reassert the potential for romantic vision, and to do so in a way that he imagines as a kind of resurrection and specifically as a kind of passage through and beyond death by water. Drowning is an important imaginative motif in Crane's work. The poems that I'll concentrate on now to explore this idea all have images of romance, quest and drowning at their center. I mean, first of all, the very great love poem called Voyages on 609, which Eliot, excuse me, and which Crane began in the spring of 1924, about a year after he's read the Wasteland, and the poem is, I think, his first sort of developed reply, and it centers, as I say, on images of drowning. The poem arises from a love affair with, as it happens, a Danish sailor who was part of the Bohemian crowd around the Provincetown players in Greenwich Village. Crane's letters are full of, well, both reflections on Eliot and also ecstatic and very moving accounts of his love affair with Emil Opfer. I'll read you just a few sentences from one letter to his friend Waldo Frank. He says, Crane does, it will take many letters to let you know what I mean for myself, at least, when I say in this relationship that I have seen the word made flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility in the deepest sense where flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counter-response, where sex was beaten out, where a purity of joy was reached that included tears. Imagery from this and other letters that Crane wrote during the period emerged in voyages. The very first section of voyages had been, in fact, sitting on Crane's desk for three years. Above the fresh ruffles of the surf, bright striped urchins with each other with sand, they have contrived a conquest for shell shucks and their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed, gaily digging and scattering. In answer to their treble reflections, the sun beats lightning on the waves, the waves fold thunder in the sand, and could they hear me? I would tell them, O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, fondle your shells and sticks, bleached by time in the elements. But there is a line you must not cross, nor ever trust beyond it, spry cordage of your bodies to caresses, too liken faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. The poem begins on shore, begins with kids playing. Their play, in all its innocence, seems to imply and gesture towards ferocious energies that are emblematized by the sea in all of its thunder and lightning and power. They fondle, they flay. The shoreline is a place where there are fragments of debris, proof of the sea's force. The poem begins with a simple moral injunction or practical warning. To give yourself over to the sea would be to enter a field of unbounded energy, to risk your identity, to risk being overwhelmed. Think of proofrock on the shore. Shall I wear my trousers rolled? Crane is there in the same place. And, having issued this warning, acknowledged the cruelty of the bottom of the sea, he throws it off and throws it behind and enters the water. And yet that important piece of cranium punctuation, the dash, a bit of punctuation that separates and connects elements, pushes that warning away and takes us into the sea. And yet this great wink of eternity of rimless floods, like a borderless space, unfettered leewardings, semi-sheeted in procession to where her undinal vast belly crane images the sea here as a woman's body and as a kind of belly that bends towards the moon. It's a kind of vision of the open horizon of the sea, as you know it seems to kind of project the curve of the earth in it. Her undinal vast belly moonward bends, everything, the wrapped inflections of our love. That's a kind of wonderful cranium word, wrapped. It would seem to mean both wrapped in the sense of wrapped up and wrapped in the sense of held in rapture. He's kind of combined possibly through error, these two forms. He makes errors. He's unlike the scholarly Elliott. He continues and now gives us instructions. Take this sea whose diapas and knells on scrolls of silver snowy sentences, the sceptred terror of whose session rends as her demeanor's motion will or ill all but the pieties of lovers' hands. Here, being in the space of the sea is like being in love or in the act of love, as Crane imagines it. It's also like being in a fabulous rhetorical world, a space of gorgeous extravagant language, which Crane unleashes here in all of its terrific force. Its language that is Iambic pentameter, unlike Elliott, is a language as rich and ornate as on the English Renaissance stage. Marlowe would have liked this. It is also a kind of romantic addiction and their elements of sort of late 19th century British and French poetry that Crane is combining here. He says, and onward as bells off San Salvador salute the crocus luster of the stars. In these poinsettia meadows of her tides adagios of islands so my prodigal complete the dark confessions her veins spell. Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours, and hasten, while her penniless rich palms pass superscription of bent foam and wave, hasten while they are true because they will not be true forever, sleep, death, desire, clothes round one instant in one floating flower. Crane understands that love, like rhetoric, cast a spell and that love and poetry create illusions. He does not, therefore, despise them. This is different from Eliot in a basic way. He acknowledges as it were the temporariness of his desire. In fact, he says, bind us in time, O seasons clear and awe, O minstrel galleons of carob fire, what are minstrel galleons of carob fire? Well, maybe they're actual ships that he's imagining, passing among. Maybe they are the lights of the moon or sun on the sea. He says to the sea, bequeath us, I know we're going to die, bequeath us to no earthly shore, in other words, don't bury us, until and as in legend Crane produces a funny syntactic reversal here. Bequeath us to no earthly shore until is answered in the vortex of our grave the seals wide spin drift gaze toward paradise. There the subject of the sentence comes last. The sentences, the seals wide spin drift gaze, is answered in the vortex of our grave. What Crane has done there is, well, he's reversed the syntactic order of subject and verb. By doing so, he's introduced first the image of death by drowning, that is the vortex of our grave. And he's put that up first and then he's followed it with the image of the seals gaze, which comes and emerges after drowning, that the seal is here, a kind of figure of a kind of consciousness and desire expressed through the eyes that survives death. Look back to the poem preceding called At Melville's Tomb. There is, here, this is a kind of elegy for Melville, which seems to presume falsely that Melville is drowned and not buried on shore, as he is. And there's an image, again, of drowning in lines 11 and 12, and again a kind of image of a vortex. Then in the circuit come of one vast coil after the storm that has wrecked the ship its lashing's charmed and those lashings remind you of the flanks of the kids on the voyages. Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled. Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars and silent answers crept across the stars. How do eyes lift altars? In Crane's letter to Harriet Monroe in defense of this poem and what he calls The Logic of Metaphor, Crane says, well, eyes lift altars in the sense that they bring the object of their desire into being through their desire. That is, you raise the altar, you create the object of worship through your yearning for it. This is, again, a kind of visionary act, and it's a version of the one that we find at the end of the second section of voyages where we see the seagulls, excuse me, the seals wide, spindrift gaze toward paradise, wide because it's a gaze that is large and takes in much space, wide because the sea is a kind of space in which we have latitude of action. Spindrift, it's a word that Crane took from Moby Dick, from Melville, replacing another word, not such a good word, which also came from Moby Dick, Finrini. It's a good he got rid of that. Spindrift is important. When you are in the sea, it is like being in a Crane poem. You don't have the ground under your feet. You spin and you drift. You spin and you drift and words mix and match and create words like spindrift. This is a condition that Crane calls in the next poem Infinite Consanguinity, where there's a kind of sharing of elements, a kind of transformation through exchange that goes on. This is understood as what happens in love. It's also understood as a kind of model for poetic process. It's imaged here in this poem, in triumphant language, as a kind of transcendence of death, here describing a moment of climactic intensity. Crane writes, And so admitted through black swollen gates that must arrest all distance, otherwise past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, light wrestling there incessantly with light, star kissing star through wave on wave unto your body rocking. And where death, if shed like a skin, presumes no carnage, no final death of the body, but rather this single change upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn, the silken-skilled transmemberment of song. Permit me voyage love into your hands. The silken-skilled transmemberment of song. This is Crane's final fantastic line of iambic pentameter, where he proclaims a kind of transformation that is at once erotic and rhetorical, where elements between two parties have been exchanged, just as exchanged in reverse, just as the silk and skill give us phonemes that are held in almost a kind of mirror relationship and alliteration, the I-L-K-K-I-L. And then Crane introduces us to another word that he coins, transmemberment. What does transmemberment mean? It seems to be made out of what? Remember, dismember, transformation. He's talking about a kind of activity that involves all these things at once and through it achieves a kind of vision of union, which is, again, as I say, both linguistic and interpersonal. Well, that seems like a good place to stop for now. We'll carry these poems on as a way to read his long poem in reply to the wasteland, The Bridge.