Hart Crane′s Aberrant English

When Hart Crane′s poem cycle The Bridge was published in 1930, a group of influential reviewers accused Crane of immaturity, sentimentality, and lack of focus. They condemned crane′s wayward, fuzzy mysticism as backwards-looking and self-defeating. Even sympathetic critics, such as Harold Bloom, have consistently portrayed Crane′s poetry as the pyrotechnic final fizzle of late romanticism. These persistent, public reservations, however, have not prevented an impressive proliferation in secondary literature concerning Crane since the late 1960s. His promiscuity, alcoholism, erratic behavior, relative poverty, tragic death, and total commitment to art have since earned him the labels of New World Rimbaud and proto-Beat. His colorful career thus explains in part his retrospective fame. Nevertheless, living hard and dying young do not guarantee artistic immortality. This article poses questions as to why Crane has mattered so much to subsequent generations of U.S. readers and what these readers find so compelling in his poetry. The answer, I would argue, lies in Crane′s idiosyncratic use of language. Far from striving for transparency, he writes in an inimitably obstructive, artificial manner. There is something seductive and absurd in his wild use of words here, I would further argue, we discover the reason behind both Crane′s enduring appeal and his supposed inadequacy as a writer. Crane did "torture" syntax, semantics, and conventional associations, not because he saw his unusual language as an eccentric mannerism but because he saw it as a tool in the service of constructing a "myth of America" and reintegrating the human and divine. Understanding thy he considered this to be the case clarifies Crane′s achievement and illuminates why his work still seems so relevant today.