E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I've been reading, lately, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry , by Christopher Beach , who knows a thing or two about contemporary (and avant-garde) poetry and poetics. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the current state-of-the-art thinking on American poetry. Still, there's a strange moment in it, in the invaluable Chapter 3, "Lyric Modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane". Beach, who should (and does, I think) know better, rather oddly parrots Yvor Winters , and his outlandish (if fascinatingly maverick) poetics, when discussing Hart Crane's The Bridge . Beach is excellent on Crane's excessive, exuberant rhetorical style (of great interest to my own poetry), but writes "if The Bridge is to be judged primarily as a modern epic celebrating the mythic and historical sweep of America .... then it must be considered a failure." This ain't necessarily so. Only really by evaluating The ...

Maurice Riordan has edited a S elected Poems of Hart Crane (pictured) for the British market, with a lovely, passionate Introduction that, unlike so much of the cold-handed, stiff-lipped sort of writing and mini-enthusiasm that gets doled out sparingly in the UK, for poets like Crane, is, actually, wonderfully enthusiastic, and humane. Riordan observes that Crane was in London, once, for a Christmas dinner with Graves and Riding at their houseboat, which is a treat to imagine - and that event in 1929 was "the high watermark" of his reception in British literary circles. In short, Crane has never been fully integrated into the British poetic sensibility. As Riordan points out, Leavis found him turgidly "rhetorical", and Douglas Dunn greeted his Complete Poems , as late as 1984, with a mighty harrumph ("his wilful wordage"). Instead, Riordan (editor of Poetry London ), celebrates "Crane's extravagant poetry". Extravagant is the right wor...