Modern poetry 2

surface inside out to suggest complex, soul- encompassing meanings
which are in turn difficult, if not often impossible, to interpret and
articulate for the intellect alone. The physical sounds and rhythms,
the evoked emotions, the intellect, intuition and clairvoyance of the
reader all must come into play at once for the poem to have its
impact, which is to say, convey its meaning.
This is pure poetry, in the sense of the "symbolist" poetry generated
in nineteenth century France by Mallarme and others. Words
overpower the whole being simultaneously instead of offering
layers of meaning that a traditional reader can penetrate down
through as interest, curiosity, determination, breadth of knowledge
and wit allow. Arthur Rimbaud wrote this pure poetry, which
strikes at the whole physical, emotional, intellectual and intuitive
complex at once. Mallarme, Paul Valery, Stevens and Eliot tried to
write pure poetry as well, and a much longer list can justifiably be
made.
The problem with pure poetry is that it is accessible only to those
with a certain purity of perception. The images, sounds and rhythms
demand a reading which encompasses all the possibilities of time
and space simultaneously. In a way, to read Crane (or the others)
successfully, you must become timeless and spaceless: you must
become eternity. By this I mean that you have to encounter the
whole universe-- including your own whole soul--simultaneously;
you have to live in all moments and all spatial and intellectual
interconnections at once, as though you saw, remembered and lived
your whole life in a single moment. In other words, you have to be
clairvoyant: see into the past, present and future simultaneously and
completely.
This is virtually impossible for most readers. By delimiting the
categories of reality, the poem limits its audience to those who have
the force of will and strength of spirit to persist through dreams and
deaths. The only audience capable of actually "understanding" pure
poetry is an audience of mystics. Few readers come up to this
requirement even marginally, let alone completely, successfully.
Pure poetry, or, perhaps, modern poetry, is remarkable when
achieved. But it is not the only poetry; there must also be poetry
which offers avenues through the physical world to the worlds of
intellect, emotion, intuition, clairvoyance, and the divine--poetry
which has, in other words, a literal meaning. Thankfully, that
poetry, too, exists in the English and American tradition.
But the notion that there are two exclusive categories of
poetry--traditional and modern--is misleading. It implies that
modern poetry has no real antecedents, that it is somehow afloat in
history, disconnected from the traditional forms and strategies of its
predecessors. Crane alludes to this implication in his letter to
William Wright: he points out that "if my work seems needlessly
sophisticated it is because I am only interested in adding what
seems to me something really new to what has been written."
Further on he urges Wright to look into Donne's poetry. This might
seem peculiar, given his remark that Millay's sentiments might be
found "much better expressed perhaps four hundred years past." But
his idea is exactly that modern poetry has its ancestors. T.S. Eliot,
Pound's first modernist hero, was himself influenced by the French
symbolists and brought Donne's poetry back into currency. There is
a direct relationship between romantic poetry and symbolist poetry,
and symbolist and modern poetry. There is a direct lineage from
Wordsworth, let's say, to Wallace Stevens, as many critics have
shown.
In fact, traditional poetry seeks some of the same ends as modern
poetry. A poem as old as the Divine Comedy aims to convey a sense
of the entire universe, in much the way I've characterized the aim of
Hart Crane's lyrics. But the difference is that Dante employs a
literal level of meaning--he tells us a story--which Crane does not
often do. Nor Stevens, nor Pound, nor many others of the modern
twentieth century. Dante embeds his plethora of figuration inside
his literal characters and events. By contrast, modern poetry embeds
its literal characters and events inside its plethora of figuration. It is
difficult, more difficult than following the events of a plot, to divine
the suggestions and allusions of pure figuration. The figures of
modern poetry, like their more literal predecessors, are meant to
expand the human spirit to soul- encompassing,
universe-encompassing places, if "places" is the right metaphor.
And having said this, it is clear that we are belly-up against the
modern idea of art as replacement for religion. The difficulties of
modern poetry, like the difficulties of true religious behavior, span
the difficulties of the human spirit. Any attempt to read this poetry
with understanding, like any attempt to be truly religious, is a sign
of profound interest and diligence for the heart of the human inner
being. It is, however, no stain on a reader to be confused by Hart
Crane's poems, in the same way it is no stain to fail to be a mystic.
It is simply a sign of being human.

© Dana Wilde 2008

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Notes
1 Quotations from Crane's letter are from The Letters of Hart Crane (1916-1932),
Brom Weber, ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965, pp. 68-69.
2 This remark carries weight as a statement of a key modern idea about the
relationship of form to content: the form of the poem is as important in conveying
meaning as the "meaning" of the words themselves. One of Edna St. Vincent
Millay's sonnets, being a form 400 years old, would convey 400-year-old
sentiments. Crane's remark calls to mind the following sentences written by William
Carlos Williams in 1944: "Your attention is called now and then to some beautiful
line or sonnet-sequence because of what is said there. So be it. To me all sonnets say
the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line `says'?"
("Introduction to The Wedge," in The Poetics of the New American Poetry,
Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, eds., New York: Grove Press, 1973, p. 139.)
3 Quotations from The Bridge are from The Complete Poems and Selected Letters
of Hart Crane, Brom Weber, ed., New York: Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 45-46.