The last Elizabethan: Hart Crane at 100.(poet appreciation)

With that odd mixture of verbal genius and sheer bumpkinship that he so distinctively embodied from the beginning, Hart Crane plundered and ransacked the English language, especially the diction and vocabulary of the Elizabethans, like a buccaneer let loose in the royal treasure chamber. The verses he composed for his lover, the Danish sailor Emil Opffer, probably around 1925, testify to this fiercely confiscatory impulse, at once tender and swashbuckling:

 
   In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed Nothing so flagless as this 
   piracy. 

Though his first masters were modern--following T. S. Eliot, he admired Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, among others--he soon came, again largely through Eliot, to Webster, Marlowe, and Donne. For Marlowe especially he reserved an intense admiration, and his correspondence rings with praise for "dear olde Kit." Thus, according to a letter from 1928, four years before his suicide, Crane wrote that the following lines from Tamburlaine "set the key for the divinest human feasting" and he praises their "kindly jaggedness":

 
   From iygging vaines of riming mother 
   wits, 
   and such conceits as clownage keepes in pay. 

Crane might have penned the second line himself, not only for its diapason of full vowel sounds and glancing alliteration, but for the unexpected concatenation of "conceits" and "clownage." (The impossible "iygging" is to be read "jigging.") "Marlowe's mighty line" resounds again and again throughout Crane's best work; indeed, that sonorous and stately, largely iambic measure remains one of Crane's distinguishing stylistic traits. Even the final line of The Bridge--"Whispers antiphonal in azure swing" with its interwoven a and w sounds--echoes Marlowe's line from Dr. Faustus: "In wanton Arethusa's azure arms."

The "Centennial Edition,"(1) which has appeared--a year late--to mark Crane's hundredth birthday (in 1999), allows the reader to trace the poet's brief but intense immersion in these and other influences, as does a new biography by Paul Mariani, to which I shall return.(2) This would-be "Centennial Edition" is in fact merely Liveright's 1986 edition of Crane's poems without any changes; the only difference is that Harold Bloom has added a learned and affectionate, if grandiosely titled, "Centenary Introduction" (one wonders what will come next, a "Centenary Blurb"?). It seems a pity that Liveright, or even the Library of America, did not see fit to issue a true variorum edition of Crane or a more comprehensive selection that would have included his essays, reviews, and letters as well (the letters are almost as remarkable as those of Keats and illumine much of the work).

For those still unfamiliar with this edition, let me say that Simon has prepared the best and most scholarly text available but without undue academic fussing; this is both a definitive as well as a supremely readable work. The Complete Poems contains all the texts of the 135 poems Crane wrote during his short life, the published and the unpublished, along with incomplete works and fragments, the whole arranged in chronological order Lines have been numbered consecutively in each poem, and there are succinct but painstaking notes that detail revisions, corrections, and variants, drawn both from manuscripts and from earlier printings. In accord with Crane's exalted centennial status, the volume is handsomely designed in befitting black and gold and at first sight resembles the sumptuous gilded tomes once reserved for princely laureates.