Modern poetry 1

Hart Crane, in a letter to William Wright dated Oct. 17, 1921, wrote of Edna St. Vincent Millay that she had "genius in a limited sense" and that she was "every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning. And here it will be probably evident that most of her most earnest devotees could not ask for more."1 This turns out to be a somewhat backhanded compliment, however, as he goes on to tell Wright that he doesn't much care for Mrs. Browning. He explains why:

... the complaint to be made against nine out of ten poets is just this,--that you are apt to find their sentiments much better expressed perhaps four hundred years past. And it is not that Miss Millay fails entirely, but that I often am made to hear too many echoes in her things,2 that I cannot like her as well as you do. With her equipment Edna Millay is bound to succeed to the appreciative applause of a fairly large audience. And for you ... she is a creditable heroine. (Letters of Hart Crane, pp.68-69)

Later in the letter Crane acknowledges that, in contrast to Millay's popularity, "the audience for my work will always be quite small," and as though providing critical support for this assertion, he has already patiently explained to Wright the figuration in "Chaplinesque," which Wright (along with a number of other readers) did not "`get.'" What Wright failed to get is a poetry familiar to many twentieth century readers: difficult, highly figurative verse which often seems incomprehensible. It is what frustrated readers both in and outside academia term "modern poetry."
The most obvious difference between modern poetry and its predecessors in the nineteenth century is its explosion of traditional forms, a result of the effort to, in Ezra Pound's phrase, "make it new." "Traditional forms" include the conventions of meter, rhyme, imagery and metaphor that were current in England and America before Pound usurped literary power, demanding that poets "break the back of the pentameter." Traditional poetry usually offers a literal, surface meaning about a readily-recognizable objective reality, which might or might not suggest a metaphoric, allegorical (and/or anagogic) meaning. When Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example, says that "All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood," she means no more nor less than that she could see only three mountains and some trees. If there is any metaphor inherent in this image, we do not know what it is, nor do we need to know; we can readily understand what these words mean without solving any riddles about their figurative implications. It is not simple, mind you, but its literal meaning is at least readily understandable in a way that "Chaplinesque," for example, is not.
Similarly we might note, with the same appreciation as Crane and Wright, Millay's amazing dexterity with the sonnet, a verse form firmly rooted in English poetic tradition as far back as Shakespeare, Sydney and Wyatt. When she begins her poem with the words "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten," not only do we take her at her literal word, but we hear Shakespeare echo through the literal sentiment and we sink luxuriously, if bittersweetly, into the familiar vibrations of a deft pentameter. The form is not new at all. Despite her modern lifestyle, Millay is not a "modern" poet. This might only be a way of saying--or giving thanks for the fact--that we can understand what she is talking about. Much modern poetry, on the other hand, offers an experience much different from traditional poetry's. Pound’s call for formal experimentation brought difficulties of diction, figuration and allusion which made the new poetry difficult to follow. A major part of the difficulty is that much poetry written after, say, 1914 provides no literal meaning, at least not in the plain, open terms of its predecessors. Pound's Cantos, Wallace Stevens' meditations, Dylan Thomas's sonic and rhythmic orgies offer images without the traditional framework of a literal, commonplace situation or dramatic conflict. Crane's "Chaplinesque" is a good example of this, and his lyrics in general provide perhaps the least literal framework of any of the widely-read modern poets. His poems are to my mind probably the purest examples of the difficulty of reading modern poetry.
In fact, to read Hart Crane's poetry with any understanding at all you have to be nearly clairvoyant. His images are so highly figurative and allusive that they're impossible to "understand," at least on a rational level, on first or second or even third reading. Crane is perhaps the prime example of this prime problem with modern poetry: that it is difficult because it has a very thin or fractured or obscured or even nonexistent literal level of meaning.
Crane is particularly difficult because he embeds figurative allusions within figures and asks his readers to apprehend or intuit or divine these figures to arrive at even a literal image. For example, the bridge in "To Brooklyn Bridge" is on first reading simply a looming presence surrounded by seagulls and water and city. The first stanza of the poem pictures in highly figurative but apprehensible terms a gull whose wings "shall dip and pivot him"3 over New York Harbor. We know from the title the Brooklyn Bridge must enter into this picture somewhere, and we see the gull "building high/Over the chained bay waters Liberty--." "Liberty" is a fairly explicit reference to the Statue of Liberty in the harbor, the gull aloft over it. Notice the syntax of the last phrase of the stanza, though: "the chained bay waters Liberty." This phrasing is simply allusive. Without even trying to make literal sense grammatically, it calls up an image of the water itself, whose waves might appear "chained" from the gull's point of view, and inserts the one word "Liberty" to create the image of the statue. There is a sense of great height, here, and perhaps the syntax of this phrase is sort of dizzy, like the gull's dizzying height.

Perhaps. There is a picture here, at least. But next, what gull can "forsake our eyes/As apparitional as sails that cross/Some page of figures to be filed away"? A gull can be like a sail--this simile is clear enough--but how does a gull turned into a sail cross a page of figures? The poem embeds a sail within a gull, and then suggests by "a page" that the sail crosses a sheet of paper filled with numbers, and the word "figures," perhaps, alludes back to the figures in the harbor--the gull, the statue, the bridge. Perhaps. In traditional terms this embedding is simply mixed metaphor.
Having labored through the comparisons of gull to sail to page, how do "elevators drop us from our day"? Apparently this is a figure for quitting time, when office workers who have gazed out their windows at the gulls get in the elevators to leave their day's work. "Day" is a metaphor for time spent working, in other words. The next three lines tell the story of what is happening in this strange poem:

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen

In the movies, a "panoramic sleight" suggests some broad, enormous trick photography in which some people, or actors, move toward some suggested but never disclosed "flashing scene." And this is exactly what Crane is doing: suggesting, alluding to, but never disclosing the literal scene itself. The bridge, that is, is never named in this poem, except in the title, and is only described by figurative language: the speaker of the poem addresses the bridge as "Thee," and in a few stanzas hails it as a harp and altar (another mixed metaphor) which has "choiring strings." Is there a verb, "to choir"? --No, this is a highly figurative descriptive phrase, embedding the sense that the bridge's suspension cables are like the strings of a harp, its girders like the outline of an altar, near which choirs sing praises to God. In the next line the harp/altar bridge becomes a "threshold,” further complicating the already embedded imagery. This is all a panoramic sleight of words, suggesting an image but never actually disclosing it. The reader is required to compile all its sensibilities for him or herself.
After calling attention to some sort of madness, in which "A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets" ("thy" referring to the bridge) and tilts "there momently," the cinematic scene shifts, and we're introduced to the sense that noon "leaks . . . from girder into street." "Leaks" provides a forceful, immediately apprehensible metaphor, but grammatically the next clause modifies "noon," saying it is "A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene":

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene

The phrase "rip-tooth" conveys a very powerful piece of imagery--it describes the skyline, if you're intuitive or visual enough to see it. The symbolism then becomes complicated when you realize it is not exactly the skyline that is rip-tooth, but rather, noon, and this suggests noon and the skyline are the same thing. Next, this skyline/noon is "of the sky's acetylene." Seriously now, what could "of" mean here? And in any case, what does the "sky's acetylene" suggest? Is it that acetylene is highly combustible, and noon combusts though the skyline? Maybe so, although another reader, more intuitive perhaps, might glimpse a clearer, purer figure. In fact, a more clairvoyant reader might have a better idea of what this whole poem is about. I don't know for certain where I am thematically when I see the rip-tooth sky-line.
By the seventh stanza I even now cannot say with confidence what the bridge’s "guerdon" is, not to mention during my first forays into the density of this imagery and abstraction. I don't know what "Accolade ... /Of anonymity" the bridge bestows, or what "Vibrant reprieve and pardon" it shows. When in the final line the speaker exhorts the bridge to "lend a myth to God," I get the notion that the speaker--or the poet--uses the bridge to embed a sense of eternity in the space-time continuum of America, the entire American universe. So many images are suggested and alluded to here, that the whole poem becomes an enigma of mystic figuration which pretty nearly completely resists the intellect.
The meaning of this poem must be grasped whole, with acute, simultaneous awareness of its sound and rhythm patterns and of the totality of imagistic (or symbolist) allusions. The sky, noon, the skyline, the bridge, the gull, the implied office workers, the continent of North America and its whole history and pre-history all dissolve into each other. To read successfully, a reader must dissolve into and embrace all the images, sounds and rhythms together.
To most readers, the necessity for this dissolving constitutes an obscurity of figuration which causes frustration, as all Crane's readers well know. The images are tremendously beautiful, and Crane's sound and rhythm patterns profoundly disturb the senses of careful readers. But the literal meaning is elusive. What have I just read?
In a way an adequate literal paraphrase is impossible, and this is what Crane teaches us about the nature of modern poetry: its figures suggest rather than directly convey meaning. It is a sleight of words which suggests a literal "flashing scene" which is "never disclosed," utilizing Stephane Mallarme's poetic doctrine that to name something explicitly is to make it automatically objective and distant. Instead, any literal meaning in a poem must be embedded in and with all its figurative meanings. The poem turns the literal

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