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Reviews
Irwin has written a book of heroic meticulousness which justifies the work of Crane to the mature and the scholarly... A capacious and provocative study.
Crane and his admirers are beneficiaries of Irwin's fine book, the most learned, perceptive, comprehensive analysis of the work ever published... Essential.
A welcome addition to the critical shelf on the poet... the most deeply felt and closely argued case thus far for Hart Crane as not merely an accomplished poet but an impressively learned one at that.
John T. Irwin's Hart Crane's Poetry is a late arrival from 2011 that merits notice and returning attention... Irwin does a great service in making this wide-ranging analysis available in a single volume.
A difficult poet—Pindar, Shelley, and Rimbaud fused into one creative mind—Crane has defeated most commentary until now. Irwin reverses that dark failure. Decades of maturation have brought this study to an apotheosis. Wallace Stevens said that poetry was one of 'the enlargements of life.' After reading John Irwin’s celebration of Hart Crane, the reader can know better what Stevens meant.
The fullest, deepest, most discerning, most instructive reading of The Bridge ever produced. An event in Crane criticism.
As always with Irwin's work, his poetry and his critical studies, enlargement is not only of life—of Crane's and indeed of the reader's—but of the life of reading itself.
What a gift John Irwin has given us in this, his in-depth, articulate, and convincing reading of Hart Crane’s poetry. I know of nothing to compare with Irwin’s analysis of this young visionary whose life—like Shelley’s and Keats’s—ended far too abruptly and, for the better part of a century, as if in failure. For those of us who have felt that Hart Crane’s poetry has held a profound key to who we have been as a nation and a people, this book is as much a vindication as it is a celebration. Crane heard among the thousand choiring webs of his bridge a complex, choiring music, and now Irwin helps us to hear that beautiful, tragic, transforming music as well.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
7
x 10
Pages
440
ISBN
9781421413877
Illustration Description
22 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
Part One: The Bridge
1. The Pictorial and the Poetic; The Bridge as a Prophetic Vision of Origins
2. The Visual Structure of Prophetic Vision; a Simultaneous Glimpse Before and Behind
3. Spengler's
Part One: The Bridge
1. The Pictorial and the Poetic; The Bridge as a Prophetic Vision of Origins
2. The Visual Structure of Prophetic Vision; a Simultaneous Glimpse Before and Behind
3. Spengler's Reading of Perspective as a Culture-Symbol
4. The Bridge and the Paintings in the Sistine Chapel; Moses and Jesus: Columbus and Whitman; Joseph Stella; El Greco's Agony in the Garden; the Grail; Dionysus and Jesus
5. Counterpoint in The Bridge
6. Foreshadowing and Lateral Foreshadowing; the Grail Quest; Eliot's The Waste Land
7. The Return to Origin; the Total Return to the Womb; the Primal Scene; Vision and Invisibility; the Dual Identification
8. The Reversal of the Figures of Father and Mother in "Indiana"; Crane's Dream of the Black Man by the River; Crane's Quarrel with His Father; the Composition of "Black Tambourine"
9. Crane's Dream of His Mother's Trunk in the Attic
10. Fantasies of Return to the Womb and the Primal Scene; Three Dimensions Reduced to Two as a Sign of Body Transcendence; the Triple Archetype; Goethe's Faust; Plato's Cave Allegory as a Sublimated Womb Fantasy; Helen as Mother; the Influence of Williams and Nietzsche; Demeter, Kore, and the Amerindian Corn Mother
11. Building the Virgin; Crane's "To Liberty"; Lazarus's "The New Colossus"; Helen and Psyche; Astraea and the Constellation Virgo; Demeter and Kore; the Virgin Mary and Queen Elizabeth I
12. The Education of Henry Adams; Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"; Wandering between Two Worlds; Seneca's Medea; Whitman and the Rebound Seed
13. "Three Songs"; Golden Hair; "Quaker Hill" and the Motherly Artist; the Return of the Golden Age; Astraea and Atlantis
14. Epic Predecessors: Aeneas and Dido; Survival through a Part-Object; Stellar Translation and the Golden-Haired Grain
15. The Historical Pocahontas and the Mythical Quetzalcoatl; Prescott, Spence, and D. H. Lawrence as Influences on The Bridge; Waldo Frank's Our America and the Image of Submergence
16. Nietzsche and the Return of the Old Gods; Zarathustra and Quetzalcoatl; the Eagle and the Serpent; the Dance
17. The Aeneid, Book 6, and "The Tunnel"; "Cutty Sark" and Glaucus in Ovid; Burns's "Tam o' Shanter"; Glaucus in Keats's Endymion
18. Time and Eternity in "Cutty Sark"; Stamboul Rose, Atlantis Rose, and Dante's Rose; Moby-Dick and "Cutty Sark"
19. The Historical Cutty Sark; Hero and Leander; Jason and the Argo; Dante and the Argo
20. Constellations and The Bridge
21. Constellations Continued; Panis Angelicus
22. Time and Eternity; Temporal Narrative and Spatial Configuration; the Bridge as Memory Place; "Atlantis"; One Arc Synoptic of All Times
23. "Atlantis" and the Image of Flight; Shelley's "To a Skylark"; Pater and the Tears of Dionysus
24. Love and Light; Love-as-Bridgeship; Pater and Botticelli's Venus; Venus and the Rainbow; Foam-Born; Pyramids and Fire; From Ritual to Romance; Venus and Adonis
25. Three Structures; the Visualization of the Womb Fantasy in The Last Judgement; the Transumptive Relationship
26. Michelangelo's Self-Portrait; Marsyas and the Suffering Artist
Part Two: White Buildings and "The Broken Tower"
1. "Legend," "Black Tambourine," "Emblems of Conduct," "My Grandmother's Love Letters," "Sunday Morning Apples"
2. "Praise for an Urn," "Garden Abstract," "Stark Major," "Chaplinesque"
3. "Pastorale," "In Shadow," "The Fernery," "North Labrador"
4. "Repose of Rivers," "Paraphrase," "Possessions"
5. "Lachrymae Christi"
6. "Passage"
7. "The Wine Menagerie," "Recitative"
8. "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"
9. "At Melville's Tomb," "Voyages I, II, III"
10. "Voyages IV, V, VI"
11. "The Broken Tower"
Notes to Part One: The Bridge
Works Cited
Index
Featured Contributor
John T. Irwin
John T. Irwin is the Decker Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he formerly served as chair of the Writing Seminars. His previous books include The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, recipient of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize.Resources
