That was [Hart] Crane’s legacy...

 

There’s something in this poet (in the life as much as the art) that calls forth the protective instinct in his readers, as well as an exaggerated sense of his loss, which Mariani called “unbearably tragic.”  Crane’s death was sad, but not tragic – he was the author of his own fate in a way few men are, but he was no Oedipus or Hamlet.  It’s not just that Crane was young, though poets who die prematurely, especially by suicide, often find readers who believe the world has done them wrong.  (Though why not think that in all sorts of ways Crane and Plath did the world wrong?)  If he had lived a lot longer and written a lot more, we might think much less of him.

 

Many readers want vision rather than poetry; and cold analysis of Crane’s vague rhetoric, his naive sentiment, and his semi-religious adolescent yearning is not to their taste...  The problem with taste is, yours is right and everyone else’s is ridiculous.  (I once knew a poet who, no matter how kind the reviews of his work, said that every specific complaint was “wrong.”)  Criticism is the exercise of taste under the guise of objectivity – the psychology of taste is such that few readers are perturbed when some mediocrity is praised, but mobs begin lighting torches when their favorites are ignored or damned.  Yet criticism is surely most valuable when it argues against the grain – at least, the reader is likely to learn more from it, even if he disagrees down to his horny soles.  We are forever grateful to a critic able to put into words something we have only vaguely felt.  Barring that, a critic makes himself necessary to the extent that when reading him we whisper, “No! No! No!”

 

Critics are the sums of their biases – they begin as arbitraries and end as certainties (the course of my own criticism has sometimes been the other way around).  You can’t stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can’t stand that whiner Keats, I can’t stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley – poets are Rorschach tests.  If there’s a negative case for Crane, it lies in all that waxy rhetoric, glossy on the outside and rotten within.  Criticism, however put, can never harm Crane in the eyes of the devoted, because what such a critic despises is exactly what those readers adore....

 

However captious or confident a critic may be, even the lightest reading of the critical past shows that the mountains of one day may be molehills to another.  Critic A and Critic B may disagree so strongly they threaten to cur each other’s windpipes.  A year may pass, or a hundred; and another critic will come along and say that A was right about such and such, and B about so and so, but that taken as a whole there was not much difference between them.  When I look over the early reviews of Whitman, I agree with almost every obstreperous howl and every quiet reservation, yet mostly the critics missed the point.  Such recognitions keep a critic awake at night.