On "Voyages I"

Paul Sherman

Although "Voyages I" concerns the deception and hidden malice of a maternally guarded world, it begins directly and descriptively, seemingly without any hidden meaning, and lets us discover it. The scene of childhood play on the beach is bright and gay. The children are not playing in the water but "above" it—"Above the fresh ruffles of the surf": an image at once domestic but, on second reading, jeopardized by "surf" and by the fact that the "ruffles" easily translate into the "folds" of stanza two ("The waves fold thunder on the sand") and that their curtain-like character, while connoting an enclosed world, defines a boundary and hides things from view. The children, described as "urchins" … are in brightly striped bathing suits, though again it is the urchins, too, who are "bright" (and shining - "brilliant") and whose "stripes" may be due to the sun or to their play, "flay[ing] each other with sand." Children's play is often cruel - that the poet is not sentimental about them strengthens his later claim on truth. …

Already they ask questions of the universe, or of the mother; at least the poet considers their "treble interjections" in that way. And they are "answer[ed]": by the sun that "beats lighting on the waves," an exact yet ominous deception of the sunlit sea, where "beats" recalls the final return to shore in "At Melville's Tomb"; and by the sea, whose "waves fold thunder on the sand"; where again the accuracy of image. Sound and cadence includes the intimation of imperious force in the nature of things, the storm that thunder and lightning portend.

Now the fact that all along the poet has been speaking is emphasized by his wish, at the end of stanza two, to speak to the children, to tell them what he knows, to guard their innocence with his experience, a thing he urgently wishes to do - the urgency powerfully transforms the poem - because he knows that, being innocently trusting, they cannot hear (understand) him, or for that matter the sun and the waves. They belong to the scene he describes, his very distance from it marking his own experience; and the scene, which for many of us at first may have been only one of childhood play, mediated by our own sentiment of childhood, now provides the evidence for the poet's warning. In his injunction to them he initially describes the scene in just such terms ("O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, / Fondle your shells and sticks"), and even as we become aware of the irony in "brilliant" we remember the happy boyhood world of "Sunday Morning Apples" - and now begin to see how much someone like Crane needed [artist William] Sommers [, whose buoyant visual art is celebrated in "Sunday Morning Apples"] to reassure him about nature's "purposes." But the shells and sticks, as the subsequent phrase insists, are "bleached / By time and the elements"; like the "fragments of baked weed" in stanza one, they are tokens of death. And so he verifies his truth: that the universe, even that of childhood, being in time and of the elements (and being elemental), is not to be trusted. Childhood doesn't last. Yet - cruel paradox - do not cross the line to experience ("but there is a line / You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it"); do not go to sea, as Melville said, do not push off from the vernal isle; and do not "ever trust beyond it" - trust to beyond it. For the sea is a cruel mother, at once too possessive and indifferent ("Too lichen faithful from too wide a breast"). The love she offers is superficial and deceptive. A bottom, in its depths, in its very nature, the sea is cruel. This is the certain truth of the final line, a single declarative sentence: "The bottom of the sea is cruel."

This is not an exceptional truth about experience. Were it not for the maternal imagery, and the poet's bitter conviction, we would consider it shortly as a truism. The children will learn it because they will grow up; "Spry cordage of your bodies" suggests that they are already at sea or intended for it. Being in time, they cannot protect their innocence. No, what the poet really wants to say is the burden of his own growing up and of his greatest love, which is why it is fitting to begin "Voyages" [the sequence] with it: Do not trust love, not even a mother's love. It is a counsel he hasn't followed and isn't about to follow. He speaks here as a disillusioned voyager, one who, trusting, had gone beyond the securities of childhood; and now he knows that love is not to be counted on, is dangerous and death-dealing. Still, the voyage beyond limits is one he will continue to make because the very love he has been denied urges him to it.

For Crane the voyage is explicitly connected with love and whether because his love is homosexual or oedipal or inordinately demanding, figures as a transgression, a going beyond limits in the metaphysical sense of attacking or searching out the nature of things. Crane refused to follow the wisdom of the poem - that "there are," as [Herbert] Leibowitz says [in Hart Crane: An Introduction (New York: Columbia U P, 1968), p. 82], "boundaries to the exploration of self and experience …" Perhaps he did not know when he spoke of the poem as a poster, a "skull & cross bones insignia," that he was flying his flag of piracy. Joseph Warren Beach reads the poem as a warning against homosexual love [in "Hart Crane and Moby Dick," Western Review 20 (Spring 1956), p. 187], but it may also be read as a declaration of it. The subsequent voyage, enacted within the maternal sovereignty and presence, and apparently with approval, may repay the betraying mother with betrayal.

From Sherman Paul, "And Gradually White Buildings Answer Day," Chapter 3 in Hart's Bridge (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1972), 139-142

Warner Berthoff

"Voyages I" opens with attractive simplicity … - clear images, straightforward syntax, neatly end-stopped lines, with the spondees that conclude the third and fourth lines contributing a fine prosodic emphasis. Expectably, though, matters are not as casual as they look, or as they sound. "Ruffles," with its double connotation of lacy edge and subdued drumbeat (both senses immediately appropriate), introduces an energetic succession of markers - flay, conquest, crumble, digging and scattering - that move us on in the next stanza to the answering sublimity of the beach scene's immense backdrop …

The poet-speaker's friendly warning in the concluding stanzas - beautiful and beckoning as the sea's wide breast may be, one must keep one's distance from its enormous caress - seems less an expression of disillusionment and "bitter conviction" than the kind of hyperbolic admonition childhood excitements routinely elicit from observing grownups. Good humor as an element in Crane's verse rhetoric is too commonly overlooked, though perhaps only the exquisite image of the children's limber bodies as "spry cordage" (added to the original draft before its first publication and expertly placed as an opening spondee within this stanza's tight run of enjambed lines) keeps this particular change of voice from self-parody. Crane may well have originally intended something independently conclusive by the gnomic statement closing "Voyages I," a line he recommended to Gorham Munson as operating "like a skull & cross-bones insignia" ([letter of ] Ausgust 28{?], 1922). Three years later, operating instead as a step in an expanding series, the line reaches beyond itself to set off the calculated magnificence of the poem that immediately follows, and follows (as the opening dash tells us) without pause or break.

From Warner Berthoff, Hart Crane: A Re-introduction (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1989) 77-78)

Eric Selinger

Crane is, in many ways, the perfect reader Whitman imagines in "Calamus": his "My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman - / so -," forms the most longed-for response to the older poet's call. …

…"Voyages I" sets its scene on a Whitmanian "marge," with the poet watching and describing from below the water-line. …

[Selinger quotes the last seven lines.] … The sexual import of the children's games is naturally emphasized by the off-shore speaker; the sea that figures as "the Eros of sexuality and the textuality of Eros" [in phrases by Lee Edelman] shapes and sharpens his gaze. And Crane's strategic enjambments force the reader - there is an element of trickery involved - to overstep boundaries, to take unpredicted leaps of poetic faith and join him. The "shells and sticks" have been "bleached" into Whitmanian "debris" - but we notice and activate their erotic charge. "there is a line / You must not cross" - but we've just crossed it - "not ever trust beyond it" - trust what? Is that trust a transitive verb, then? - " / Spry cordage of your bodies …" and so on. Crane's closing line, like Whitman's Song of Myself, is self-descriptive, performative. "I stop somewhere waiting for you," the poet says, and the line's been waiting there for us the whole time; likewise, "the bottom of the sea is cruel" we learn, just as we touch bottom at the end of the stanza, and the last word is "cruel" indeed.

From Eric Selinger, "When I'm Calling You: Reading, Romance and Rhetoric In and Around Hart Crane's `Voyages,' " Arizona Quarterly 47:4 )Winter 1991), 90, 91, 92

On "Chaplinesque"

John Norton-Smith

The poem is free from literary allusion, or the conscious use of other poems. It is simply an artist's public testimony, or editorial manifesto, built out of recreated film sequences wholly composed of simple setting and gesture, and put together in a definitive plot: stroll, encounter with object in need of protection, discovery and accusation, evasions, unsuccessful comic escape and "recap." The poem contains one slight, literary connection with T. S. Eliot's "Preludes" [letter of October 6, 1921]: "I have made that `infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing' of Eliot's into the symbol of the kitten." …

Activity (gesture and movement) is basic to the total idée of the poem. The implied and symbolized capacity for art, sympathy, gaiety and failure is imagined as activity not personage. Hence the title, "Chaplinesque" which has been suggested by, or modeled on, "Humoresque," "a capricious musical composition." Crane's decision to commemorate Chaplin's art is paralleled by Carl Sandburg's tribute "Without the Cane and the Derby (for C.C.)" in Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922). Sandburg tries to make use of onamatopoeic effects; a comparison of the two poems brings out the felicities of Crane, as against the tasteless elaboration of Sandburg.

… The poem, through the use of the pronoun "you" in line 17, relegates the reader/audience to the normal world of philistine simplicity. See [Charles] Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 266: "[Hart Crane and I] discussed the purpose of poetry. I said it was a love letter to the world. `A very small world,' said Hart ruefully."

From John Norton-Smith, A Reader's Guide to Hart Crane's "White Buildings" (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 1993), 61-63

Richard Hutson

The self of "Chaplinesque" is a child of the random, whose great hunger and need as signified in his "too ample pockets" have only the wind for satisfaction. He would seem to be the repository of the wind's savings, almost as if his slithered pockets were a bank teller's window. His wealth consist in the ample emptiness of his tattered pockets, which are always opened to the world, ready to accept and receive in love what the world offers …

This play between the world and self, between the world's initiative and the self's reactive powers, is the essence of the poem. If the self is not strong enough to force its way, it can exploit, by its movement of adjustment, the world's energy to find the "recesses" of the world. The world of this poem prepares within the self the place for its acceptance. But it also prepares within itself the space by which its negativity can be relieved or transfigured. If it prepares the "ample pockets" and the "elbow coverts," it also provides the "step" upon which the kitten finds some respite from the "fury of the street." It also has the "recesses" and the "lonely alleys" within which the self can evade the full brunt of the fury. The solutions to the conflict have to be magical, visionary, at least in part. The self has to find its solutions within its own weakness, And this feat the Chaplinesque self performs elegantly. In his passivity he is a child of grace. He must hold himself open to something beyond his will, such as it is, even if his will should be concerned with legitimate objects. If he "finds" a kitten or sees the moon "make / A grail of laughter of an empty ash can," it is not because he has gone, like the modern Parzival, in quest of these insignificant or significant objects. His success lies in his vagabondage, in his ability to transcend any quest or even his own clownishness. He must be available to the wind, to its gratuitous and random consolations. The "game" of life, the clown's transformation of the world into a field of play, "enforces smirks." It demands the compromise, the partial expression, the repression of laughter in the "smirk" further distorted by its suggestion of inauthenticity. But this Chaplinesque self is open to the pure gratuity of a vision of liberation. Beyond his need, his humiliation, and his hunger, he finds a spiritual fulfillment. Beyond the "empty ash can"—a new version of the empty receptacle and, in this case, a double negativity, since it is empty even of the burned down remains of the world's fury—there is the "grail of laughter," a purely naturalistic or secular redemption of the human body, the smirks and puckerings of both the cop and the clown achieveing the full liberation, their consummate expressivity, in this vision. …

from Richard Hutson, "Exile Guise: Irony and Hart Crane," Mosaic 2:4 (Summer 1969), 77-78

Crane's "Logic of Metaphor"

A Letter to Harriet Monroe

(as reprinted in Poetry, October 1926)

[This is the letter to Monroe in which Crane analyzes the connotative meanings of his words and proposes a "logic of metaphor" that depends upon close and repeated readings. It is one of the few documents that openly argues for a highly intellectualized approach to the reading of poetry.]

… [A]s a poet, I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and the perceptions involved in the poem.

This may sound as though I merely fancied juggling words and images until I found something novel, or esoteric; but the process is much more predetermined and objectified than that. The nuances and feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past.

This argument over the dynamics of metaphor promises as active a future as has been evinced in the past. …

Its paradox, of course, is that its apparent illogic operates so logically in conjunction with its context in the poem as to establish its claim to another logic, quite independent of the original definition of the word or phrase or image thus employed. It implies (this inflection of language) a previous or prepared receptivity to its stimulus on the part of the reader. The reader's sensibility simply responds by identifying this inflection of experience with some event in his own history or perceptions - or rejects it altogether. The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology. This "pseudo-statement," as I. A. Richards calls it in an admirable essay touching our contentions in last July's Criterion ["A Background to Contemporary Poetry" 3 (July 1925), 511-528], demands completely other faculties of recognition than the pure rationalistic associations permit. …

From O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997), 278-79.

Tim Dean:
On "The Logic of Metaphor" as an Alternative Discourse

In his understanding of the function and capacity of poetry, Crane subscribed to a poetic ideology that was at once transhistorical and culturally specific. The notion that poetry is a discourse of another kind - that poetry provides access to outcomes unattainable by any other representational means - inheres in the tradition of poetic practice. In a much reprinted letter to Harriet Monroe, Crane claimed the privilege implicit in the notion of poetry as a discourse of another kind: "If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic - what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to the alphabet every breath or so?" …

Crane's "logic of metaphor" - which he also calls (in the same essay) the "dynamics of inferential mention" - may represent the "genetic basis" of speech, but it functions quite differently from ordinary spoken language. Metaphoric language is to rational logic as poetic language is to ordinary language - and, we might add, as the unconscious is to consciousness. Through "metaphorical inter-relationships" and metonymic displacements ("associational meanings" and "inferential mention"), Crane's poetic logic exploits the substitutive and combinative potential of language to such a degree that it may be said to resemble the logic that governs the linguistic unconscious. …

… Unlike Eliot's elitist notion of poetic tradition or Pound's initially democratic notion of poetic language, Crane's criteria for poetic production and reception seem not to be factored by class.

Crane's criteria are esoteric without being elitist, because nobody is denied access a priori to experiential intensity. …

…

Where the logic of the closet depends upon a sign system whose restricted circulation generates a form of privacy factored by sexual identification, Crane's poetry is restricted to a small audience by the hermeneutic difficulty resulting from "the privacy of connotations" generated by his "logic of metaphor." In this respect, both the logic of the closet and the "logic of metaphor" concern informational (or epistemological) privacy, the limits on what can be communicated or known. Crane's case is distinguished by his poetry's commitment to the more radical substantive (or ontological) privacy of inviolate experience - that which remains private even when known and communicated. Crane's "logic of metaphor" is deployed in the service of this more radical substantive privacy, that of an "absolute experience" whose intensity generates a secondary form of privacy by disrupting the relations (discursive, affective, and erotic) that conventionally connect persons to one another and to themselves.

Although Crane does not aspire to opacity - as he wrote to [Allen] Tate in 1924, "I have always been working hard for a more perfect lucidity, and it never pleases me to be taken as willfully obscure or esoteric" - his poetry is esoteric in that it requires of its reader a form of initiation: "It is to be learned," the speaker of "Legend" advises. This initiation is based on an experience of intensity that is often figured in more or less erotic terms - "This cleaving and this burning" in "Legend" - but that remains irreducible to a purely sexual problematic, because Crane's paradoxical desire is to escape desire and its principal contingency, namely, loss.

…

… Crane's poems instantiate a form of private experience that can be concealed no more than it can be revealed. Intensity eliminates inviolate identity and produces instead a second order of substantive privacy - that if inviolate experience - which the poems preserve for their readers. Crane's reader is asked not to identify with a textually generated subject position (homosexual or otherwise) but to reexperience a jouissance that eliminates every subject position.

By offering an alternative to the privacy of the closet, Crane's poetry proleptically challenges and refines one of the most sophisticated models through which it has been understood, thereby indicating the potential of poetic forms to alter ostensibly hegemonic constructions of sexuality and subjectivity. His revelation of a fracture in the otherwise all-encompassing logic of the closet also explains Crane's commitment to poetry as a discourse of another kind since his highly distinctive lyric practice was the means of access to outcomes - subjective, ontological and aesthetic - that appeared unattainable by other means. Crane preferred poetry over the homosexual subculture of 1920s Greenwich Village because his lyric - rather than his notorious sexual - practices promised freedom from the disabling binary options of closet privacy.

from Tim Dean, "Hart Crane's Poetics of Privacy," American Literary History 8:1 (Spring 1996), 85-86, 88, 91, 105-106.

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