Roaring Boy

Adam Phillips

• The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane by Paul Mariani
  Norton, 492 pp, US $35.00, April 1999, ISBN 0 393 04726 1
• O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber
  Four Walls Eight Windows, 562 pp, US $35.00, July 1997, ISBN 0 941423 18 2

In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ RP. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman.’ Dylan Thomas’s poems, Randall Jarrell wrote in 1940, ‘often mean much less than Crane’s – but when you consider Crane’s meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage’. And whether he was thought to be confused and self-deceiving, or vacuous, or even crazy, Crane was such a troubling figure, both before and after his early death, that people were inclined to describe his poetry in a way that cast aspersions on his character; as though such unapproachable poems could only be approached biographically. Comparing Crane’s ‘epics’ with Zukofsky’s, Hugh Kenner wrote, in his once canonical The Pound Era: ‘The Bridge yields only to nutcrackers, “A” to reading.’ There was certainly something that Crane’s poems wouldn’t let you do to them.

Vol. 21 No. 19 · 30 September 1999 » Adam Phillips » Roaring Boy (print version)
Pages 45-46 | 3682 words