Crane's critical effort - like Keats and Rilke - is most pronounced in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Gorham Munson, and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank, Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.
Most serious work on Crane begins with his letters, selections of which are available in many editions of his poetry; his letters to Munson, Tate, Winters, and his patron, Otto Hermann Kahn, have been particularly valuable. Even his two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his Emersonian "General Aims and Theories" (1925) was written to urge Eugene O’Neill’s critical foreword to
White Buildings, then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in
Poetry.
The 'Logic of Metaphor'
As with Eliot's "objective correlative," a certain vocabulary haunts Crane criticism, his "logic of metaphor" being perhaps the most vexed. His most quoted formulation is in the circulated, if long unpublished, "General Aims and Theories":
As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension.
There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism, in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "...The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explain outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology...."
L. S. Dembo's influential study of
The Bridge,
Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within the familiar rhetoric of the Romantics:
The 'logic of metaphor' was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; whether or not the vehicle of an image makes sense, the reader is expected to grasp its tenor.
Difficulty
The publication of
White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation for a foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal. Even a young Tennessee Williams, then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line--of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect....".
It was not lost on Crane, then, that his poetry was difficult. Some of his best, and practically only, essays originated as encouraging epistles: explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and the variously well-considered or impulsive letters to his friends. It was, for instance, only the exchange with Harriet Monroe at
Poetry when she initially refused to print "At Melville’s Tomb" that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print. But describe it he did, then complaining that:
If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic--what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to the alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn’t there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations?
Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed the exchange alongside the poem: "You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive." In any case, Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories":
New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation. ...the voice of the present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic.
More recently, Allen Grossman has given a much respected guest lecture at the University of Chicago, "On communicative difficulty in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's
The Broken Tower."
The "Homosexual Text"
Recent queer criticism has pointed out that it is particularly difficult, perhaps even inappropriate, to read many of Crane's poems - "The Broken Tower," "My Grandmother’s Love Letters," the "Voyages" series, and so on - without a willingness to look for, and uncover, homosexual meanings in the text. Tim Dean argues, for instance, that the obscurity of Crane's style owes itself partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual - not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open:
Thomas Yingling, arguing from a more essentialist viewpoint, articulates yet another problem with the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse." Even more than a personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such biases obscure much of what the poems make clear; see, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from
White Buildings, a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of (heterosexual) family life:
Brian Reed, an emerging critic of Crane deeply interested in Crane's homosexuality, has contributed to a project of critical reintegration. Reed, though sympathetic to Crane's homosexuality, states that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can damage a broader appreciation of his overall work. He has, on a less formal scale, also contributed a study of Crane's famous gay lyrical series, "Voyages," to the Poetry Foundation.
