SOURCE: "A Poetics for 'The Bridge '," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall, 1980, pp. 278-93.

[In the following essay, Ramsey argues that readers must have a clear idea of the poetics of The Bridge in order to appreciate Crane's genius.]

The criticism of Hart Crane's The Bridge has generally dealt out the opinion that Crane was, as James Russell Lowell called Shakespeare, "an inspired idiot." No one can be satisfied with the poem, but no one can let it alone either; no one (almost) can find the large truth in it that Crane claims to have attempted, and yet most readers find intermittent excellence, calling it with Allen Tate "a collection of lyrics, the best of which are not surpassed by anything in American literature."¹ The designation of the poem as a failure rests on the imputation of a "myth" or "vision" structure for The Bridge, an idea abetted by Crane himself in several letters. The correspondence of this vision to Whitman's—again supported by letters—has been the subject of many studies and is generally felt to be fundamental. But whereas Whitman has succeeded, Crane has failed in his mythmaking—and this for a variety of reasons, it is argued, mostly structural (or personal).

I will not be able to answer all the critics as I make my way to my own subject—the punning in The Bridge—but a few facts, both internal and external to the poem, may be surveyed. First is the insubstantiality of Crane in his letters. On no modern poem, surely, has the intentional fallacy had more deleterious effect than on The Bridge. Like those mean spirits who dismiss Shakespeare's first fourteen sonnets because there is a subtext of financial request, the Tate and Winters crew (their many followers, in spirit if not in opinion) adduce from "friendship" and the letters and even gossip that Crane was too uneducated, too unstable, too drunk, too this and that ever to have accomplished what he set out to do; and what he set out to do we know from the letters as well. It must be admitted that Crane has played into their hands, but it must also be acknowledged that Crane was trying in these letters to convince others—including a patron, shades of Shakespeare!—of the work's importance. They are not to be trusted as guide or gloss.²

The only relevant data we can learn from the letters are that the individual poems were not written continuously, that the poet abandoned the project for three years, and that the final order—indeed the final selection—was hasty and almost offhanded. These facts argue neither for epic intention in the poem nor for a consistent myth or steady vision. In fact, in the poem we find too many lulls and low points, a lack of narrative, not even a clear, pervasive persona to carry the burden of vision. It is simply not fair to demand something that neither the poem nor its crafting suggest.

Another pervasive critical collapse, besides intentional fallacy, is the kind of structure demanded of The Bridge. I have yet to find a critic who even acknowledges this demand. We have continuously required the form of The Bridge to be Aristotelian. It is not. There is, as Northrop Frye says, "a distinction between two views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism."

These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view of literature asprocess. For Aristotle, the poem is a techne or aesthetic artifact: he is, as a critic, mainly interested in the more objective fictional forms, and his central conception is catharsis.³

Frye then explains catharsis. But his explanation of Longinus is what interests us here:

Just as catharsis is the central conception of the Aristotelian approach to literature, so ecstasis or absorption is the central conception of the Longinian approach. This is a state of identification in which the reader, the poem, and sometimes, at least ideally, the poet also, are involved. We say reader, because the Longinian conception is primarily that of a thematic or individualized response: it is more useful for lyrics, just as the Aristotelian one is more useful for plays.⁴

I think it is self-evident that what we have been asking of The Bridge is catharsis, but what The Bridge provides is ecstasis.

The issue is clarified by Frye when he later synopsizes the two critical approaches in the appreciation of the Bible as literature:

The Bible may thus be examined from an aesthetic or Aristotelian point of view as a single form, as a story in which pity and terror, which in this context are the knowledge of good and evil, are raised and cast out. Or it may be examined from a Longinian point of view as a series of ecstatic moments or points of expanding apprehension. .. .⁵

Since I believe The Bridge offers just such "points of expanding apprehension" instead of a "story" with cathartic effect, the critical task is to locate those points, study them, and evaluate their effects, not to complain of incoherent narrative or inconsistent "myth." If there is a chartable "form" in The Bridge, it will be rhythmical only.

There will be themes in such a poem, of course, but the real interest is in the accomplishment of that "state" in which reader, poem, and poet are identified. This is attachment, not the cathartic detachment; it is transubstantiative, not consubstantiative. It is also entirely subjective, for who can say that a reader is involved but that reader? But it is probably possible to agree on which moments seem ecstatic on the basis of technique alone. That is, these moments are characterized not by understanding (as is catharsis, the detached experience) but by intensity. The moment is not emotional (as is catharsis: pity and terror) but rather spiritual, which it will be allowed often seems to transcend the understandable. Thus, the language of such moments may involve the reader in ways he cannot entirely explain; the resultant "obscurity" (with which Crane is usually charged) is thereby a necessity, not an excrescence.

Now, I am no more friend to obscurity than any other modern critic, but I am arguing only that in the Longinian approach it can be seen to be functional. If I seem to be unclear myself, it is at least partly due to a lack of Longinian vocabulary; one wishes for half the literature on ecstasis that there is on catharsis! I hope only to have established that there is an approach to the sublimities of The Bridge; this is not special pleading and the poem will fail or succeed on its own merits. But the fact that we have been applying inadequate (Crane's "intentions") and inappropriate (Aristotelian) criteria to the poem has kept us from appreciating what it is.

What is The Bridge? It is, I believe, a lyric (for which, as Frye says, the Longinian approach is most appropriate) and more specifically a religious lyric. The substantive assignment is too complex to take up here except to remind ourselves that the Longinian view does not expect a narrative (or epos form) and that the definition of lyric offered by Frye is "an associative rhetorical process, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paranomasia, sound-links, ambiguous sense-links, and memory-links very like that of the dream."⁶ This reminds us instantly of The Bridge. Once we shed the demand for amyth, we recognize the truth of the matter: Crane is at play in the field of words. The impulse of The Bridge is allowed its rein and the result, if I may be so bold, is delight. That harried myth and Crane's own pretensions become, in the Longinus lyric, irrelevant.

By the modifier, religious, I mean ritualized ecstasy. If Crane is at play, he is seriously at play.⁷ Again, the critical absorption of ritual into literature is too complex for this essay, but a crucial point may be made here. The "myth critics" are all—to my knowledge—Aristotelians; that is, they look for pattern and cathartic effect. Their point of view is essentially that of the observer—they are consubstantiative. They might ask, What is the effect of the death of the god on me? Looked at from a Longinian perspective, however, the question changes. It becomes, How does it feel to die as a god? The issue is transubstantiative. The point of view is not that of the society, but rather that of the god. The viewer of the god's death is absorbed into the god (who is also the land itself). This is exactly the moment of ecstasis. So the Aristotelian myth critic speaks of pattern and effect (epos and catharsis), the Longinian critic of the intensity of the moment. Again as Frye says, the reader (viewer, society) and the poem (the meaning of the experience, the resurrection of the land through sacrifice) and ideally the poet (the god) are one at such moments of ecstasis. Thus, I believe, in the large sense The Bridge is religious, not in an Aristotelian, spectator way, but in a Longinian, participator way. It is a transubstantiative poem.

The further religious question in The Bridge needs some definition. Clearly, the question is not what Crane believes in. That is irrelevant, for it posits a spectator, it detaches. From a Longinian point of view, it is fruitless to ask a reader to interpret symbols; symbols require us to acknowledge a this and a that, the image itself and its intellectual content. Consequently, there is an aesthetic distance (which, as Frye says, is synonymous with Aristotelian catharsis). But distance is the enemy of ecstasis. We proceed, inexorably it seems, to another outlandish conclusion: there are no important symbols in The Bridge.

That is, the god really dies and the god is I. Thus it is, as others have recognized (having participated in the poem and the poet), the fullest ecstasy and climax of the poem (meaning not a narrative climax, but the "highest" point) is the heartrending line, "I could not pick the arrows from my side." At once is the poet (Crane), the poem (Maquokeeta here), and the reader (through the rhetoric of first person) united. The god is poet, poem, and I. It is belief incarnate, the wafer on the tongue, ecstasis.

Intensity is here achieved by stunning understatement, not unlike Othello's final speech which begins, "Soft you." It is so unexpected that it jars the emotions loose. And as a technique in The Bridge, it is almost unprecedented; in "The Dance" section it is utterly unpredictable. For the power of understatement one is led to Herbert and Vaughan, poets whom Crane knew and associated in a particular context, which I want to take up now. But first to reiterate the position I have outlined: there are no symbols in The Bridge because the purpose is not to make something other but to invite participation; the transubstantiative imperative is to identify the thing with the maker and the participant; thus symbol is irrelevant. Somehow, the poem, the poet, and the reader must become one. Here it is understatement, but that is not characteristic of the poem; the poem generally hits its "high" moments with such multiplex language that it initially seems obscure, crabbed in rhythm, and undecipherable.

The language does not remind one of Whitman. This is, I hope, the last of my outlandish assertions. Whitman is not Crane's master. I don't know if one can speak of a "master" for Crane's poetics, but one can certainly speak of affiliates. Whitman, for all of Crane's accommodation in his letters, has exactly nothing to do with Crane's language. If there is a Whitman influence, as many have argued and as would seem only decent since he is invoked in The Bridge, it is on that irrelevant "myth" that has occupied so much printed space. We have seen that there is no "myth," not in the sense of pattern. There is, however, religion in the sense of ecstatic moment, not a steady vision but "visions," not a philosophy but an apprehension, fitfully perceived. And this perception, for a poet as god, is in language. Crane's language is condensed and ambiguous, a "shorthand" as Crane called it. Whitman's language is expansive, almost discursive, denotative.

No, it isn't Whitman whom Crane most resembles; it is Hopkins. The field for commentary is wide open. R. W. B. Lewis, in his useful book on Crane, dismisses Hopkins in a footnote, and L. S. Dembo doesn't raise the ghost at all. But it is Hopkins about whom Crane was most excited during the years of the writing of The Bridge, as Unterecker tells us: "Before he returned Winters's copy of the poems, he made typewritten copies of a number of them and even committed several—including 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'—to memory."⁸ The year is 1927, and Crane's enthusiasm—always mercurial—-does not diminish. The amazing thing is that the critics have not made the connection; even Yvor Winters himself, who loaned the book of poems to Crane, does not make the obvious connection; he says, "He [meaning Hopkins] violates grammar as he sees fit, mainly to gain results which he considers more valuable than grammar: striking epithets and striking phonic effects,"⁹ but he does not associate this technique with Grane; indeed he berates Crane for the very same qualities.

So much for the critics. Crane and Hopkins—not Crane and Whitman—should be studied together because of predispositions: to a poetics, to an "ecstatics," and to a simple love of language. In addition, Crane and the Jesuit priest share a commitment to what the priest called "inscape," the utter reality of a thing in its full thingness, and "instress," the making real of such a thing. The primary difference—Crane admits "I am not as original in some of my stylisms as I had thought I was"¹⁰ after reading Hopkins—is in the source of reality: for Hopkins it is God and for Crane it is the imagination. A full study of these two poets, a needed study, would not of course be so superficial.

I begin to move into more familiar territory when I make the last of my basic assertions. Crane's poem posits no god; instead, it is the ecstatic ritual of confirming the Word. And ultimately, in spite of certain misdirections, the word is neither "Cathay" nor even "bridge." The Word is word. In the word is all the intensity of belief and ecstatic identification; in the word is salvation itself. That this idea is already available to Crane students will be evidenced by these quotations from major studies:

The Bridge is not a naive attempt to set up a national myth based on technology for its own sake, but an account of the exiled poet's quest for a logos in which the Absolute that he has known in his imagination will be made intelligible to the world. . . . The "logic of metaphor" was simply the written form of the "bright logic" of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words."¹¹

The plot of The Bridge is the gradual permeation of an entire culture by the power of poetic vision—by that ever-pursuing, periodically defeated but always self-renewing visionary imagination. .. .¹²

The creative act itself is the true subject of these poems, the life of the poet-quester-visionary-loverseeker whose role is as futile, yet as necessary, to himself as Sisyphus'.¹³

In addition, there is the precise assertion by Barbara Herman—in the best study of Crane's language—that "Crane's language more than depended upon his philosophy; it was his philosophy."¹⁴ In exact accord with my own conclusions, but without the Longinian underpinning, Herman believes that Crane thought of words as things, as actualities in the way that witch doctors believe in words, almost magical incantations; that Crane "became the figure of the twentieth century priest, investing his words with magic properties, erecting with them, either the Word or words, his frail bulwark against chaos and dissolution."¹⁵ She also gives credence to Crane's own formal statement of poetics, which has nothing to do with mythmaking in the Aristotelian sense but only with the power of words. "General Aims and Theories" is, unlike the letters, a public and worked-outprogram; thus the notions of the "logic of metaphor" (associational meaning of words) and the "dynamics of inferential mention" (allusiveness, primarily) may be valued by the critic. It will be noted, however, that his entire "poetic" has to do with word color and potential sense; it has nothing to do with epos, mythmaking, or even structure. A most fertile suggestion is Herman's: "The unit was the word, and, like the spot of color in pointillism, that word could be altered in various ways by the other words placed around it."¹⁶

Here we see that the Word is—dare one say?—sacramental. This idea may help us to see, in "Atlantis," why the apostrophe reads

—O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!

The Word is not Cathay, obviously, but "Psalm of Cathay"—the singing is the religious experience. This makes the singer (priest in Miss Herman's vocabulary but god and king in archetypal terms) the center of the sacrament, his song (The Bridge) the sacrament in myriad syllables, and the choir (readers) the celebrants. And finally, all the conceptions that I feel are necessary to a proper, fair, and useful reading of the poem fall into place.

We are to begin by looking for ecstasis, moments of intense identification, poem with poet with reader. These moments may be, at least initially, obscure because the language itself will be intense (or stunningly understated). The poem itself will be lyrical and religious and, at these ecstatic moments, it will be transubstantiative; in this it reminds us of Hopkins rather than Whitman. But it is not a symbolic poem because the Word is word, not some other (such as Hopkins' God). Therefore, the participation of the reader is with the poet as poet (the god of the language) and the Word as word itself. Again, this is understood to occur at moments, not continuously.

A final apology for dragging the reader over familiar terrain. I have not seen these precepts gathered together cogently in any of the criticism on Hart Crane and I have felt that the poem has been dealt with unfairly because of it. Here, major ideas have been shamelessly summarized for what I hope is a sound purpose: to provide a poetics for The Bridge.

Since the poem is not symbolic (since it refers not outside itself but to itself) it calls attention to its own devices. This self-consciousness has often been distracting to critics who want a myth, but if the Word is sacramental it must call attention to itself. Thus we get a language which both Glauco Cambon and Joseph Riddel have characterized as "violent."¹⁷ It is a good term, entirely appropriate to the moment of ecstasis (the god dies, after all). Other characterizations include Cambon's "accumulated paroxysm" and "forest of baroque exclamations" (on the same page!),¹⁸ R. P. Blackmur's "sweeping, discrete, indicative, anecdotal language,"¹⁹ David Bulwer Lutyens' "a kind of inspired telegraphese."²⁰ Crane himself, in his "General Aims and Theories," speaks of "the logic of metaphor"—as well as "shorthand" in a letter—and in The Bridge itself he offers "unfractioned idiom" and "sanskrit charge." Clearly the language calls to us.

If not symbolic, then, what is it? I am struck—after due study and the shock of crabbed rhythms and oddness has worn off—with the absence of simile. The manifold likenesses in the poem are all demanded; whereas a simile is an instruction to notice a likeness, the metaphor is an injunction. The difference—I am delighted to discover after all these years—is precisely the difference between consubstantiation (the simile, the symbol) and transubstantiation (the metaphor). The first requires aesthetic distance, the latter participation; the first insists on likeness, the latter suggests identity. It follows that when one interprets a metaphor, he participates in the poem (by identifying the likeness); one merely acknowledges a simile. Thus it is consistent with the poetic outlined that The Bridge is devoid of simile and packed with metaphor; it requiresparticipation.

It is time to quote Longinus on language:

There are, it may be said, five principal sources of elevated language. . . . First and most important is the power of forming great conceptions. . . . Secondly, there is vehement and inspired passion. These two components of the sublime are for the most part innate. Those which remain are partly the product of art. The due formation of figures deals with two sorts of figures, first those of thought and secondly those of expression. Next there is noble diction, which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language. The fifth cause of elevation .. . is dignified and elevated composition. .. .²¹

For Aristotle, language was "embellishment"; catharsis was achieved by action. But for Longinus language "elevates"; ecstasis is achieved by choice of words. If the poet innately has the first two powers—conceptual and passionate—then by artifice he can create the "elevation," the moment of expanded apprehension. The metaphor is the figure Longinus indicates and the only undebatable qualification for such artifice. Whether Crane is capable of "figures" of thought, noble diction, or dignified composition is therefore moot. Whether he is capable of metaphor is not.

Metaphor—implied likeness—is basic to many figures of speech: personification, metonymy, synecdoche, paradox, oxymoron, etc. But we are looking for that figure which most intensifies the likeness so as to make it an identity, intense and immediate. Only that will satisfy our need for the ecstatic moment. That figure is the pun. For the pun integrates two ideas into the same sound. The symbol merely integrates two ideas into the same notion; and the simile merely insists on integration. It is the immediacy of the pun that allows it its special effect. The pun tries—as Lewis says of the "Atlantis" section—"to say everything at once."²² This is the linguistic equivalent of transubstantiation. With the pun the author (god/poet) does two things at once (dies/is resurrected); the reader makes this possible by responding to the pun in its twofold meaning at the same moment; and the ecstasy is achieved instantaneously. The pun says, This is my body and my blood; I died, I live. Both ideas—whether ironic (to an atheist) or celebratory (to a believer)—are implicated in the one word—logos, Christ, or—for Crane—word itself, "multitudinous Verb."

This is a good deal to argue for the infamous pun, whose history is not pretty. It is certainly a frequent device in The Bridge, although the critics have on the whole ignored it (except for some local effects) or summarized it and thus left the reader without bearings. Yet it is a potent literacy device (re: Joyce) and to a Longinian approach quite perfect for instant, intense apprehension. For an Aristotelian—or neoclassicist—it is quite indecorous, however; here, for instance, is Dr. Johnson sitting in judgment on Shakespeare's puns:

A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. .. . A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."²³

It's a wonder the pun did not disappear from the very vocabulary, so felicitous is the Doctor's damning phrase. One is almost convinced (like a Polonius): 'Tis very like Cleopatra! But the pun did not die with the Queen of Egypt; it lived to relish "infinite variety" in English poetry.

Coleridge, on the other hand, recognized Shakespeare's puns as intensifiers and—whether in comic or serious moods—most would agree. In our time, a close critic of Shakespeare can write:

By means of the multiplicity of meanings characteristic of the pun, Shakespeare is able to let his characters understand each other in different degrees. The characters may talk with each other and really believe that they understand each other. But the true (hidden) meaning of the one is not grasped by the other. The audience, however, may well understand it.²⁴

In other words, the pun has gained recognition as functional, either as intensifier or a key to dramatic irony. And these are the very fundamental uses of the pun in Crane.

I say "very fundamental" because William Empson has argued seven types of ambiguity in which the pun figures prominently. To involve ourselves in his sensibility would be to lose track of our prey, except perhaps to note that Empson's definition of the third type of ambiguity is what is meant here by the pun: "when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously."²⁵ He goes on to distinguish this from the fourth type, in which we encounter "a more complicated state of mind in the author."²⁶ an assertion rather appropriate to Crane (Empson analyzes a poem by Hopkins in this section), but the third type offers a clear perspective from which to view the common pun.

The common pun—or an aspect of paronomasia, the wordplay which is identified with the lyric—is of three typical kinds: derivations, homophones, and compressed metaphors (often fossilized). One might include those words which strongly suggest others, such as the "Proem"'s unfractioned—which suggests not-fractioned (as in mathematics), not fractured, and not refracted (as in optics)—and I have no objection to calling these semi-puns, but they resemble metonymy and I will not discuss them.

Although the pun shares with simile and symbol the aspect of likeness, its special feature is simultaneity, as Empson suggests. This feature is not foreign to Crane criticism. R. W. B. Lewis says of the "Atlantis" section, "The almost overpowering difficulty is rather that this is a work of total synthesis, one which at every point is trying . . . to say everything at once."²⁷ Coffman early commented on the "multiple values of the most efficient of Crane's images,"²⁸ and Herman says that the puns "were a method of loading his words with implications and disparate meanings; sometimes with ironic context. . . sometimes packed with emotional implications. . . .²⁹

This simultaneity at first suggested to me a structure for The Bridge, something—perhaps—like Arpad's platonic notion that "the bridge was not only the material ideal of a nation, but also the spiritual ideal of the individual"³⁰ or Eugene Paul Nassar's general view that it is a poem "which dramatizes a dualistic experience of life,"³¹ or something dealing with the imagery of doubleness, from "twin monoliths" to "biplane" to "whispers antiphonal." But that leads to no Aristotelian structure. Neither does the hopeful but vapid assertion which one reads over and over again, that (in this case, Lewis) the dual vision has led to "a visionary wedding of the timeless and the temporal, the ideal and the actual,"³² an idea variously adumbrated.

That kind of structure is not forthcoming from the poem. What actually happens to the reader is that at moments he feels some identity between two "things," some immediateness. If the poet is in control, these are moments of ecstatic understanding, the fullest possible participation in the poem. At such a moment the poet-god has uttered a word-death which absorbs the reader-communicant. No amount of exegesis after the fact will substitute for that moment, that participation. So Lewis is somewhat justified in apologizing for the "critical betrayal" of analysis when he looks at the word curveship at the end of "Proem":

It is almost a critical betrayal to dismantle the word "curveship," so many of the ingredients of "Proem" has it fused and with such finality; but it secretes too ingenious a pun not to remark upon it. The "curve" in the coined word relates the bridge's arching curve to the inviolate curve by which the sea gull, at dawn, had forsaken our eyes; and it thus suggests that the lost morning vision may—by means of the bridge and of what the bridge has been made torepresent—yet be recovered. The second syllable recalls the sails that had similarly been glimpsed and had vanished; while it also adds dignity to the object addressed. . . . But Crane perhaps knew that the word "ship" is equivalent to the word "nave" in religious architecture—from the Latin word navis. The nave is the central passage or path across which the believer moves to come into God's presence at the altar; by its etymology, it is therefore both the way and the vessel which carries the believer along the way.³³

Far from being a "critical betrayal," this is what I believe the Crane critic must do (and with no apologies or hesitations about whether Crane knew Latin or not). For I am convinced there is no Aristotelian, primary or previous structure, only such chosen words which intermittently drive us deeply into the poetic process itself: the relationship between words, the possibilities of words.

The real "betrayal" in Lewis' words is not the exegesis itself, but the distance he tries to establish. It is his selfconsciousness that is so inappropriate here (although understandable because it is after the fact); this is not the communicant's or the Longinus response. What he says is—in the proper perspective—"the mind is transported into word associations because of the pun." One wishes the critic could be so humble as to admit this. We remember that the Longinian approach requires subjectivity.

I chose the word curveship for focus not only because of its ingenuity, but because it focuses the critical issue. The word has been the jumping-off place for those who trace the "curve" imagery throughout The Bridge and find there the coherence which the Aristotelian demands of art. For instance, in a sensitive and valuable essay, Stanley K. Coffman finds the curve the primary image:

The bridge thus speaks, through this one of its properties, a universal geometry, an "unfractioned idiom," and argues, by what can best be called a logic of metaphor, the fundamental point which the poem was to present: its man-made configuration, repeated by nature, is given a kind of divinity, and the mathematical thinking which planned it a like sanctity.³⁴

One is grateful for such a statement, for it challenges the reader to think through the poem, even though it cannot finally be adopted. So, too, for a list of "thematic anticipations" which Frederick J. Hoffman provides in his book, The Twenties.³⁵ And the same is true for any concentration on language interworking in Crane. Yet the various explanations have been unconvincing simply because they are detached; because they preconceive the poem's function as pattern, the poem as techne. It is not finally satisfactory with Crane to objectify the poem. This would seem to be the critic's aesthetic, not the poet's.

Freed from the myth and Aristotelian ideas of structure, the critic should be allowed (or required, rather) to respond with intimacy and with faith in the poetic process. For the reader who perceives the pun, there is immediate delight; this would seem to be the value of the "thesaurus effect"—it rewards the reader as well as the poet. Crane's shorthand is for those who can read shorthand. It is not required of the poet that he be democratic, that his vision be available to all, or that his effects be common. Stanley K. Coffman is an inspired reader in this sense; he may project onto the poem more form than it can admit of, but he is ready to follow the signs and participate in the workings of the poem. He too recognizes the nature of the pun:

One more instance of Crane's use of white, to illustrate further the multiple values of his imagery. .. . In "Atlantis" the stars ring the Bridge in a "palladium helm." Silver-white palladium from the vocabulary of science carries out, of course, Crane's effort to express the natural in the vocabulary of his age (with helm, it gives new expression to the old); it is an element which is rare, costly; it is malleable and fuses more readily than the others of its group—all properties which support and enlarge the meaning of the central symbol to which it is related through its color and its use here with star. It was, in fact, named for an asteroid, which in turn took its name from Pallas Athene. Palladium also denotes a statue of Athene, in particular one on thecitadel of Troy which was supposed to guarantee the safety of the city, and by extension applies to anything that is said to ensure protection: a further passage from palladium to the Bridge, and additional evidence of the remarkable strength of Crane's epithets.³⁶

This is true Crane criticism—in spite of the pointless "central symbol" business. Coffman here participates in the choice of the word palladium in just the way the poet does; thus there is true communion between poet, reader, and word. It is just what the Longinian critic must do.

Not every word of The Bridge creates such ecstasis. How could it? Prolonged ecstasy is called madness. One cannot be at the "high" point constantly because it would no longer be the "high" point. A rhythm of stress and unstress is required, which may suggest the value of such "low-stress" poems as "Harbor Dawn," "Indiana," and "Three Songs." But The Bridge signals such moments more often than most poems—thus the "violence" of its language. We are forced to communion by the language.

When to praise and when to condemn? For me that is the crucial issue of critical application. If the reader does not recognize what Lewis and Coffman do in the puns on curveship and palladium, how is he to appreciate fully, participate fully, in the language (subject and object of The Bridge)? Since the approach is subjective of necessity (Longinian, lyrical, religious) what can determine the excellencies and what the failures of the poem? Only personal response? Surely more is required of any adequate reader. I have quoted Lewis and Coffman at length because I think that is what is required: thorough, even creative investigation of the language. Instead of imposing myth or vision or even pattern on the poem, he must be open to it, to be response-able, to take the color and meanings as its wafer and wine. No doubt there are meager moments in The Bridge and even trivial puns, but in the larger rhythm it is the accomplishment of the ecstastic moments that counts, that makes the poem the achievement it is. Only an appropriate poetics is needed to appreciate that.

And that's where I want to end. On the accomplishment and the plain, simple/complex work that goes into it. Hart Crane was no "inspired idiot." He was, to adjust an earlier idea, at work in the field of words. He was a professional poet. Malcolm Cowley tells an almost funny story about Crane choosing a word for the great lyric, "Voyages II." The word is the celebrated spindrift, which is unimprovable in its context. Crane is paging through a dictionary, his eye falls on the word, and he instantly recognizes it as the perfect word for the line: "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise."³⁷ This I call an almost funny story because it causes some unease in the critic. If the word did not come out of the poet, can it be truly his? Is it talent or genius to find a word in a dictionary? This is pointless unease. The fact is that when we encounter the word—in its sounds, meanings, and relationships to other words—we discover it, just as the poet did. The form of The Bridge is just this process. And Hart Crane, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, was that kind of poet, a professional ecstatic.

NOTES

¹ Allen Tate, Man of Letters in the Modern World (Cleveland: World, 1955), p. 290.

² See Crane's letter to Harriet Monroe for another, more humble Crane: "The execution is another matter, and you must be accorded a superior judgment to mine in that regard." (In Brom Weber, ed., The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane [New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1966, p. 240].)

³ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 66.

⁴Ibid., p. 67.

⁵Ibid., p. 326.

⁶Ibid., pp. 271-72.

⁷ Frye usefully says, "a good deal of sacred literature is written in a style full of puns and verbal echoes," ibid., p. 294.

⁸ John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), pp. 528-29.

⁹ Yvor Winters, On Modern Poets (New York: Meridian Books, 1959; originally 1943), p. 174.

¹⁰ Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, p. 526. A passage from a general, brief study of Hopkins will relate his affiliation with Crane: "What Hopkins provides is not exposition, reflection, and argument but a succession of spontaneously engendered feelings, concentrated by scenes, some narrated, some enacted, and uttered in language and imagery thick with implication, "manifold' in suggestion—to adopt a crucial adjective from T. E. Hulme, the theorist of the Imagist movement—which in its own fashion led the 'twenties in search of the "intensive manifold,' of intensity as opposed to amplitude, of impact rather than exposition" (Francis Noel Lees, Gerard Manley Hopkins, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966, pp. 13-14).

¹¹ L. S. Dembo, Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge: A Study of The Bridge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1960), p. 9 and p. 34).

¹² R. W. B. Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 382.

¹³ Joseph Riddel, "Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure," ELH, 33, no. 4 (Dec. 1966), 478.

¹⁴ Barbara Herman, "The Language of Hart Crane," Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), 52.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 54.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 61.

¹⁷ Glauco Cambon, The Inclusive Flame (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963), p. 134, and Riddel, "Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure," p. 486.

¹⁸ Cambon, The Inclusive Flame, p. 164.

¹⁹ R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), p. 305.

²⁰ David Bulwer Lutyens, The Creative Encounter (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), p. 99.

²¹ Bernard F. Dukore, Dramatic Theory and Criticism (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), p. 79.

²² Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane, p. 370.

²³ Walter Raleigh, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908), pp. 23-24.

²⁴ W. H. Clemens, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1951; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 91-92.

²⁵ William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956), p. 102.

²⁶Ibid., p. 133.

²⁷ Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane, p. 370.

²⁸ Stanley K. Coffman, "Symbolism in The Bridge," PMLA, 66 (Mar. 1951), 70.

²⁹ Herman, "The Language of Hart Crane," p. 63.

³⁰ Joseph J. Arpad, "Hart Crane's Platonic Myth: The Brooklyn Bridge," American Literature, 39, no. 1 (Mar. 1967), 85.

³¹ Eugene Paul Nassar, The Rape of Cinderella (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), p. 144.

³² Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane, p. 369.

³³Ibid., pp. 254-55.

³⁴ Coffman, "Symbolism in The Bridge," p. 67.

³⁵ Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1962), p. 264n.

³⁶ Coffman, "Symbolism in The Bridge," p. 72.

³⁷ Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (New York: Viking Press, 1951), pp. 229-30.