POETS Day! Stephen Crane
Illustration by Rene Sears
It’s the last POETS Day under the Biden Administration. Put an early Friday lid on it and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
Hit the beach and take a nap, ride a precarious bike, have some ice cream and meet the people. That hair ain’t gonna smell itself, Jack. Whatever you do, don’t waste the day working. It’s practically the weekend.
Literally take a minute for a little verse first.
***
In 1897, Stephen Crane was on a ship that sank. Subsequently, he spent thirty or so hours in a lifeboat with the ship’s captain and two crewmen. After getting safely back to New York, he wrote a short story called “The Open Boat” about the adventure. It’s harrowing.
“A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats… As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water.”
He does a good job putting you in the boat – putting anxiety in you – surrounded and claustrophobic in the troughs and hoping while knowing better you’d glimpse salvation somewhere on the horizon from the crests. Eventually the lifeboat flipped and they swam for it. Three made it to shore, Daytona Beach, sixty-two years before it was a NASCAR draw.
I read several accounts of the circumstances that led to Crane on a lifeboat. He was hired as a correspondent to go down to Cuba where rebels were making noise that would later erupt into the Spanish-American War. Poetry Foundation’s was the most interesting, and they (or he or she or collaboration or whatever makes up the almost always impressive anonymous biographers at that site) mentioned the incident only in passing, writing that he was “shipwrecked while on a filibustering expedition.”
I had no idea there was a definition of “filibuster” divorced from Jimmy Stewart. I knew filibustering as when you talk about baseball and read grocery lists to make congress quit. I had no idea there was more to the word.
“A member of an American band of adventurers who incited revolution in various Latin American countries in the mid 19th cent.; gen. a person who engages in unauthorized warfare against a foreign state.”
That’s according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th ed. of which I still have a brick-and-mortar copy. I’m a little enchanted by the new (to me) use of the word and on the lookout for opportunities to use it, shoehorn ready.
Crane’s best known for his prose. To be honest, he’s best known for The Red Badge of Courage, but he wrote four other novels and a host of short stories. He was good with the journey from Innocence to Experience. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets – more of a novella really – shocked readers with its unflinching depiction of poverty in New York’s Bowrey. He was daring. It’s frustrating to think what he might have written had he lived beyond twenty-nine years.
He wrote a lot about the journey from innocence to experience, in both prose and poetry. I don’t get the sense that Crane took poetry as seriously as he did prose. In a letter, he told a friend he wrote five to six poems a day, but preferred to call them “lines” rather than poetry. It was all free verse, very short, and almost exclusively a variation on one of a handful of themes.
XXXVI
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)I met a seer.
He held in his hands
The book of wisdom.
“Sir,” I addressed him,
“Let me read.”
“Child——” he began.
“Think not that I am a child,
For already I know much
Of that which you hold.
Ay, much.”He smiled.
Then he opened the book
And held it before me.—
Strange that I should have grown so suddenly blind.
All of the poems in this post are taken from his first collection, The Black Rider and Other Lines, and they are numbered rather than titled. The above is one of the longer ones. Most are practically epigrams.
I’ve made my position on free verse pretty clear over the years. I’m inconsistently against it. The short length of most of Crane’s poems forces you to ask what, other than line breaks, separates this from prose? At least in longer forms a free verse writer can establish a rhythm, “compose in sequence of the musical phrase.” He can also develop themes and images that rise to poetic. Not so much in just a few lines.
XLV
Transition, thou art for suckling children,
Thou art the enlivening milk for babies;
But no meat for men is in thee.
Then—
But, alas, we all are babes.
One of the things that makes an epigram impressive – I want to say “when done properly” but that seems unnecessary as it goes not just for epigrams but for ham sandwiches, pratfalls, etc. – is that it’s succinct and fits a form while being clever or true. Witty observations are all well and good, but poetry is something else.
I mentioned, twice now I think, he wrote about innocence and experience. A lot of his poems seem like a glimpse from a study or a character arc he’d like to explore, a moment of assertion the hero makes. They aren’t quite weird-kid-with-a-notebook silly, but there’s unearned revelation. I’m asked to be impressed by an unoriginal thought; something trite for an audience that wants to think well of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with unoriginal thoughts; nothing new under the sun, etc. But he presents them as if they’re an “Ah ha!”, like he’s trying on Oscar Wilde. That aside, he writes well, but there’s not much attempt at poetic craft.
XLVII
“Think as I think,” said a man,
“Or you are abominably wicked;
You are a toad.”And after I had thought of it,
I said, “I will, then, be a toad.”L
You say you are holy,
And that
Because I have not seen you sin.
Ay, but there are those
Who see you sin, my friend.
Again, Crane was a devastatingly good writer of prose fiction. My saying his poetry is not technically interesting doesn’t diminish that. In any case, his poetry isn’t without importance.
Regular readers of this series probably won’t believe me, and I suspect a “There he goes again,” will be thought, but I had no intention of bringing up Ezra Pound. He just appeared. At first, there was a throwaway line buried in Crane’s Wikipedia entry: “Crane’s poetry is thought to have been a precursor to the Imagist movement.” Next, Poetry Foundation mentioned that he “foreshadowed” the Imagists. Then links started popping up all over. It wasn’t my intention. I didn’t go looking for him, but there’s a period where all poetic roads lead to Pound. I’m just reading the map.
The longer pieces do have a rhythm if you look for them, and Crane’s fame, at least for his novels, may have been contributing permission for abandoning traditional meter. Attitudinally, I can see Pound getting drawn in.
It’s good that Crane left an impression. I can’t trace his influence. I wouldn’t be able to look at an inheritor’s poem and say “Crane-esque,” but there are more astute people who have. He lived such a short life. He produced a good bit in what little time he had, but it was little time. If others carry on, something survives.
There’s roguishness in his biography, along with cute little boy sentimentality. While waiting to disembark on his doomed boat trip to Cuba, he holed up at the wonderfully named Hotel de Dream, a nightclub/brothel with bordello aspirations. He hit it off with the proprietress, Cora Taylor. He must have put on a charming display for her. When he eventually washed up on that Daytona beach, she made the trip all the way from Jacksonville to pick him up. When they lived together in England, she went by Cora Crane, even though she was legally married to someone else.
The pair went to Greece together to cover the Greco-Turkish War and picked up a stray dog Stephen named “Velestino, the Journal Dog.” In England, the dog sickened and died. He wrote a friend, according to Wikipedia, “for eleven days we fought death for him, thinking nothing of anything but his life.” Again, according to Wikipedia, “In December 1879, Crane wrote a poem about wanting a dog for Christmas. Entitled “I’d Rather Have –”, it is his first surviving poem.”
An adventuring war correspondent with a predilection for ladies of the night and a life-long love of dogs is endearing in our anti-hero age. The poetry’s meh, but he could really write.
LXV
Once, I knew a fine song
—It is true, believe me—
It was all of birds,
And I held them in a basket;
When I opened the wicket,
Heavens! they all flew away.
I cried, “Come back, little thoughts!”
But they only laughed.
They flew on
Until they were as sand
Thrown between me and the sky.
