Happy Birthday, Harold Hart Crane

Hart Crane (1899-1932) is the greatest might have been in our literature, the closest thing to an American Keats, a sublime visionary and transcendent phrasemaker. Though sober-minded critics have long warned against the excesses in his life, Crane's poems remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Consider "a grail of laughter" in the poem "Chaplinesque," a perfect example of surplus value in poetry; its force is greater than the sum of its meanings. By the way, the kitten in this poem stands for something very specific in the allegory in Crane's mind. Can you tell what?

-- DL

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

-- Hart Crane

Comments

[Laura Orem]

One of my favorite bits of poetic irony is that Crane's dad invented LifeSavers candy.

[DL]

I agree, Laura. Isn't it crazy?

[Michael Quirk]

That's not Hart Crane in the picture. That was his lover while he was living in New York.