Our Savage Art by William Logan

Author:William Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, POE000000, Poetry/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

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,

Presumes no carnage, but 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 …

Passages like this make people love Crane beyond reason—though even such passages have their share of clumsy phrases (“transmemberment of song”!). I love such passages, but reason reminds me that however brilliant they are they’re not enough. If I may speak like the Red Queen, Crane was so much greater than poets who were lesser, and so much less than poets who were greater.

Crane failed to write the poetry of the American continent Emerson was calling for before the Civil War; if the ideal seems naively nativistic now, the country was once younger and less cynical. Crane was no innovative genius like Whitman; he was perhaps closer to a peasant poet like John Clare, an outsider too susceptible to praise and other vices of the city. Defensive about his lack of education, a Midwestern striver out of a Sinclair Lewis novel, Crane tried to make it among the big-city literary men, a rum in one hand and a copy of The Waste Land in the other. Had beauty been enough, he might even have succeeded.

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