Anatomy of a Mother
Readers of Hart Crane’s poetry sympathize with Harriet Monroe. The founder and editor of Poetry magazine from 1912–1936 was confused by unclear imagery when Crane submitted to her “At Melville’s Tomb,” an admittedly difficult poem but one that is represen
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Anatomy of a Mother
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eaders of Hart Crane’s poetry sympathize with Harriet Monroe. The founder and editor of Poetry magazine from 1912–1936 was confused by unclear imagery when Crane submitted to her “At Melville’s Tomb,” an admittedly difficult poem but one that is representative of the poet’s style. Not averse to the idiosyncrasies that characterize the tenets of modern poetry, Monroe championed many of the emerging poets of her day: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, as well as Hart Crane. But she did initially wonder about the successfulness of Crane’s verse, and, from the poet’s response in a letter written in 1926 that is held up in Crane’s oeuvre to be central to the understanding of his poems, she accuses him of being, among other things, “elliptical” and “obscure.”1 Readers of Crane can understand Monroe’s reservations in publishing his work, because Crane often requires explanation. In fact, many of his letters contain glossaries for his images. Similarly, James Merrill’s poetry is often described as politely ambiguous with a drawing-room tone that many readers find idiosyncratic, at best, or distancing, at worst. Readers of Elizabeth Bishop, however, are almost never dumbfounded by her style; rather they remark on her lucid descriptions and detailed observations. Randell Jarrell, reviewing Bishop’s first book North & South, postulates that beneath her poems there is written “I have seen it.”2 In different ways Harriet Monroe and Randell Jarrell help to delineate these poets’ style and, in so doing, point out that Crane, Bishop, and Merrill use language in ways that suggest narratives beyond the existing written words of poems. The poetic language that characterizes the poems of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill involves a movement between concrete and abstract imagery that at once expresses and conceals P. Nickowitz, Rhetoric and Sexuality © Peter Nickowitz 2006
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R h e t o r i c a n d S e x ua l i t y
what can be said to be the autobiographical impulse of the poet. The autobiographical impulse provides a way to discuss biography and how it is used to create an individual’s identity as it is figured in poems. This impulse can be as explicit as describing a personal experience or it can be a desire to express a sensation, arising out of a factual experience but that does not include a representation of the experience itself. The connection between sexual and creative identities in these poets’ work that I illustrated in chapter 1 adds a further nuance to this impulse. In order to analyze the poetic projects and language of these idiosyncratic poets, I begin my discussion looking at their early collections and, then, at later poems. Crane’s first volume, White Buildings, provides an introduction to his impacted style that exhibits these shifts between concrete and abstract images. This shift is also apparent in Bishop’s first book, North & South, where one of the central characteristics of her idiosyncratic rhetoric—the assertion of, and play with, perspective—is establishe
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