Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York Review Books Classics)

Author:Wolff, Geoffrey [Wolff, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590175590
Publisher: Random House Inc Clients
Published: 2012-04-18T05:00:00+00:00

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“It is a glimpse of chaos not reduced to order. But the chaos alive, not the chaos of matter. A glimpse of the living, untamed chaos.”

—D. H. Lawrence,

of Harry Crosby’s poetry

Poets with free access to a printing press will write poems to keep it cranking out pages, and Harry Crosby’s bibliographic chronology attests to his determination to save his printer from lassitude. Sonnets for Caresse was first published in the autumn of 1925, and a slightly revised edition appeared several months later. Yet another version was the first book produced at rue Cardinale by Roger Lescaret, and during that year, 1927, Harry also released Red Skeletons, made up mostly of sonnets from the previous three editions, together with ten new poems. Three books by him appeared in 1928: Chariot of the Sun; the first of three volumes of Shadows of the Sun; and another book of new poems, Transit of Venus. A book of tirades (Mad Queen), another volume of Shadows of the Sun and a book of dreams (Sleeping Together) were published by the Black Sun Press in 1929, and after Harry’s death at the end of that year Caresse published two books from unrevised manuscripts completed during 1929: Aphrodite in Flight, a slim and slight manual of love based on principles of aeronautics, and Torchbearer, Harry’s final book of poems, published in 1931 with an afterword by Ezra Pound.

More remarkable than its quantity is the development of his work: during five working years Harry duplicated a century of complicated aesthetic transitions. If it is true that the literary topography of a certain age is best read in the contour maps left by its minor writers, Harry mapped the interior territories of several cultural epochs. His sonnets are conventional in form, and often in sentiment, and might have been written by a precocious Victorian schoolboy in imitation of Romantic poets under the influence of Elizabethan sonneteers. Red Skeletons is a decadent imitation of Baudelaire. Chariot of the Sun is a collection of symbolist verses, while Transit of Venus and Mad Queen are indebted to surrealism and to Dadaism. Sleeping Together is a post-Freudian exercise in the recovery of subconscious states, and Torch-bearer traffics in automatic writing.

Yet for all the cultural baggage carried for a short time and then abandoned, for all the shopping-spree character of his cultural appropriations, Harry wrote few poems, if any, that are not marked by three preoccupations: that the poet is a holy man, a seer; that a metaphysical system governs the poet’s days, and must be unriddled; that the poet owes himself a violent life and an early, explosive death. From the beginning he realized that as a poet come latterly to his calling, he would be obliged, were he to cut a place for himself, to short-cut his way to the upper elevations of fancy and expression he was pleased to think of as genius. Thus he tried to develop a personal, unique metaphysic, a symbolical system, a mythology.

But this followed Sonnets for Caresse and Red Skeletons.

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