Under the Influence

Under the Influence

"I dreamed/ Nothing so flagless as this piracy," the speaker of Hart Crane's lyric sequence "Voyages" says to his lover when the fragile metaphysical sanction beneath their seaborne union deteriorates, no longer legible in sunlight's flashing script on the water. Crane's readers have boarded this vessel, the poet's idiosyncratic craft, ever since, but flags have not been in short supply. Rescue and piracy have proven mutually dependent operations for this audience. Throughout the seventy-four years of his posthumous reception, Crane has been claimed by poets and scholars, indeed in waves, who find his previous critics to be poor custodians of his legacy or misled analysts of his intention and significance.

Hart Crane: After His Lights (University of Alabama Press, $35) by Brian Reed shows convincingly that the story of Crane's reception is the story of principal embattlements in the poetic and critical movements during his career and since his suicide in 1932. Reed trains focus particularly on his revival by the nonacademic New Americans, poets anthologized as such by Donald Alien in 1960, a revival that, if hyperbolic and self-serving, was in balanced proportion to the diminishment of Crane by the New Critics-notably his friends in life Alien Tate and Yvor Winters-who were preserving him in their canon, but with qualification in telling epithets like "magnificent failure" (Howard Moss), "extreme example of the unwilling homosexual" (Tate), and, especially hysterical, "saint of the wrong religion" (Winters).

It is in this climate that, by contrast, Robert Creeley opens his volume For Love with the 1951 poem "Hart Crane," in which Reed cites a "manifesto in germ" that makes the maligned Crane an "occasion for articulating a poetics of community." The disgraced outsider "stuttering, by the edge/ of the street, one foot still / on the sidewalk, and the other / in the gutter. . ." became a rallying cause for the new alternative-tradition poets, who nonetheless proceeded to sort themselves according to their hesitation to overidentify with the "doomed queer," as Crane had been remade. Reed is a subtle and original interpreter of this anxiety, proposing that Craneallusive maneuvers in the poems of Paul Blackburn and Bob Kaufman exercise their sensitivity to the swagger then prevalent in their "cowboy" bohemia, a discriminating aesthetic to be sure. He goes so far as to suggest that, after their deaths, Blackburn's eclipse and Frank O'Hara's ascent repay the sophistication with which they appropriated their hero, the former merely profiling Crane and counterpositioning himself (singing straight, as Reed has it), the latter borrowing and repurposing Crane's vatic apostrophes and images and his technique of suturing into interdependence poetic elements that seem surfeit. O'Hara enacts his signature self-awareness, as in "Poem (I to you and you to me the endless oceans of)," with its midcourse admonishment "but cut it out this / is getting to be another poem about Hart Crane."

To rescue Crane is natural even to readers without express allegiance to a poetics or a community; his "logic of metaphor" obliges an intimate reader to rewire a dense associative network in which, for the charge of it, Crane has inscribed his life. In need, the poet's intimate readers are superb: noteworthy, Thomas Yingling, whose 1990 book Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies remains one of the signal achievements in queer literary theory, and Hunce Voelcker, the forgotten San Francisco poet whose best work. The Hart Crane Voyages, was at sixty-eight prose pages in 1967 a brilliantly untrained critical companion-slashpsychosexual fantasy before "hybridity" had currency. Reed is unsummoned by such close reading and instead examines Crane's writing regimen. Others have detailed the poet's uncompromising habit of blaring 78s on the Victrola-Ravel's Bol�ro or Sophie Tucker-but Reed concentrates on the duration (five minutes) of the records and Crane's ceaseless replaying of them late at night, to suggest a connection between the mixture of "artifice, excess, erotics, disjunction, compression, and 'immaturity'" in Crane's lyric-"in short its 'prepostmodern' quality"-and the work of "radical artificers" such as Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews.

Reed is perhaps a more intimate reader of critic Marjorie Perloff than of Crane. Her study of O'Hara's ambulatory Lunch Poems and the probable impact of Richard Wagner's motif structures on modernist epic are both recounted here. Indeed, Perloff's recent skeptical inquiry into "the obsolescence of the author as a unit of literary-critical analysis" may undersign a greater aspiration of Reed's book. Which is to say that Hart Crane: After His Lights, however studiously poststructuralist. has restorative aims for the monograph genre. His twenty-first-century update is swifter and more capacious, centrifugal enough to spin Crane as an "assemblage of texts, glosses, quotations, commentaries, [and] syllabi," an "author-anthology" that includes A. C. Swinburne and John Ashbery. Agile and creative, switching interpretive frames frequently. Reed wends through Crane a nomad's tour that never flags.

[Author Affiliation]

Brian Blanchfield is the author of a book of poems. Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004). He lives in Los Angeles.