[MUSIC] So the cultural epic, poems that extended themselves in sequence toward a complex subject by generating new poetic styles and forms, was a distinctive contribution that American poetry brought to modernist writing. Unlike the epics of earlier eras with official backings such as Virgil enjoyed from the government from the Aeneid, these modernist versions were self proposed, voluntary, ad hoc. No particular authority sanctioned Eliot or Crane or any of the writers in between and after them, though their writings reveal affinities with degrees of authority. Eliot and Crane are specially useful for examining together because the Waste Land and the Bridge understand the role of authority quite differently. Eliot's belief in ritual and tradition grants authority to established institutions and get support from colleagues such as Ezra Pound in Cantos. By contrast, Crane's impulse was to disregard most examples of official authority. The artists and explorers he admired operated as outsiders, and to view institutions as still evolving. This poem might find endorsements from William Carlos Williams in Spring and All and The Descent of Winter, Marianne Moore and Marriage, and Mina Loy in Songs for Johannes. Though the cultural epic would evolve by way of many hands, its defining features reveal our extremes in the contrary positions that Crane developed along with Eliot. The most striking distinction between the two sequences involves setting. The city Is Elliot's nemesis. Years after the first World War has officially ended, London keeps itself under siege. Elliot was employed in the foreign transactions department of Lloyd's Bank from 1917 to 1925, and he saw first hand how the harsh financial reprisals of the Treaty of Versailles kept the battle going by other means. An entire generation of the young had been lost in that war, leaving an unforgiving London infinitely impoverished. Crane's New York, by contrast, was bustling in the 1920s, benefiting immensely from a boom economy. For a young gay male, opportunities existed that were inconceivable in Crane's home base in Cleveland. A community that attended museums and purchased books united diverse populations over shared projects. If Eliot's epic must pick its way tentatively across a ruined landscape, Crane's epic is able to sweep back in time to gather materials that will bring even more abundance to the present. Both poems want to produce a genealogy that is based on the exciting, but also inherently disruptive, discipline of anthropological research. Eliott began this trend with anthropological underpinnings introduced at a late date in the poem's composition, and in scattered references in foot notes. These notes seem designed to be, among other things, a shield to protect a poem vulnerable to being dismissed as nonsense. As indeed it would be, especially in English, for much of the decade. Yet most of the last section of The Waste Land, which the manuscript shows as having been written in one setting with little alteration, could not have existed without the mechanism of The Desperate Quest. The Chapel Perilous, and Such Tests of Weakness and Submission that evoke a poem, like Gown in a Green Light. The Fisher King, whose lands have become infertile, also establishes a framework, that while it not directly rehabilitates Eliot's London, usefully acts as a reminder that history moves in cycles. Rituals that are still in place are a record of the persistence of fundamental ideas that serve a stabilizing purpose, information that Europe can benefit from hearing. An earlier poem by Eliot, Gerontion explores history's cunning corridors, which sometimes give and sometimes take, but never in their own times signal which one of those is happening. Big ideas about cycles of civilizations past and future were prevalent in the 1920s with scholarly research by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vying for attention alongside Crank Tirades by Lothrop Stoddard, a rising tide of color. Crane's anthropological commitment was to a historian and folklorist, Lewis Spence, whose Atlantis in America, 1925, offered evidence to claim the possibility of a continent that once existed between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico. Now lost to volcanic activity, but in an earlier time a land bridge that introduced tales with the basis in Greek and Roman myth to the Aztecs who in turn disseminated them to Amerindian tribes. Crane was less interested in the details of these myths, which in any case, Spence presented in the sketchiest of terms, than he was taken by the idea of cultural transmission on a grand scale over a vast geography. Ideas that had the capacity to carry so far must have been ideas that promoted, at a very deep level, such concepts as renewal, collaboration, and adaptation. When Crane arrived at the deepest point in deep time in the cycle of five poems he called Powhatan's Daughter, he had been impelled there by a ritual celebrating a vegetation myth and the male, female principle. As spring times storms with tornadoes were inseminating the earth, the Chieftain Maquoketa was performing a dance that was an imitative response to the tornado and Crane, inside the poem as an observer, could not resist joining in the dance. That joining in was an off shoot of the myth of renewal, it was simply irresistible which explains how it spread. Indeed from this perspective, the dance is a kind of prototype of the machine, a form of transfer that took modular form. While Eliot's rituals preserved traditions, showing them carefully reshaped over the centuries as they passed, Crane's rituals pulled in others and offered renewals, breakthroughs, enhancements. Eliot's anthropology prepared for his later affirmation of Christian principles, while Crane's anthropology, though close to paganism, was even closer to establishing a basis for American ingenuity and its propensity to invent the new, including new methods of transit. Crane and the Bridge is sociable approaching and approachable. Might not be a great dancer, but you can't keep him off the floor. The numerous modes of transit are present throughout the Bridge. All was encouraging open channels. No matter where Crane takes us into the past, we can find the latest invention that helps us to move. We're home it seems even in the past, now that we have a means for leaving it. Crane delights in transit for the panoramic mobility it offers his poetry. But it serves also as a hallmark of progress that a nation uses to define itself as modern. New York exists much like the Brooklyn Bridge, as a node that funnels activity through it, shuttling people back and forth in constant networks. That's why the city represents America and why the bridge represents the city. Eliott's emphasis on the psychological rather than the social presents that which is fluid and shifting as a mark of lost control. In his London, taxis wait, throbbing disturbingly, a sign the city is an exposed wound, its nerves requiring closed cabs. But the cab itself is a sign of distressed inhabitants. While Crane in his poetry is always blissfully shuttling to and fro from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, hopping on airplanes, trains, steamboats, and even a canoe. It's cutting edge technology for Amerindian tribes. Elliott concentrates his resources, marshalling his thoughts to embark on a quest that is highly individualized. Elliott needs a discovery that will set his lands in order. Crane is always looking beyond the looming horizon where whispers, and tiffanol, and azure swing, beckoning him on. Eliott's world of trauma, is populated by ghosts. Some are companions or acquaintances who are caught in the war, but many are writers whose voices Elliot hears intersecting with his own. A conversation that may enhance or degrade a moment, expanding an insight or ironically undercutting it. Eliot's ghostly surrogate is Tiresias, experienced as both man and woman, so forever caught between two worlds. It is a violent world these ghosts speak out of, where Philomel was raped, where Dante witnesses the most elaborate torture. And when it is interrupted, it takes music to break into it, or words set to music, such as Full Fathom Five from the Tempest or Rhine maidens harmonizing in German in the Wagner opera. Or just the melodies that float up from someone playing a mandolin. They are powerful enough to exert a change, yet music and the words that make mindless will always be fleeting, carried on air. When popular music arises, though, its catchy tunes and cheesy rhyme, that Shakespearian rags so elegant, so intelligent, has a mechanical quality that makes it catch in the ear. The companion of the throbbing taxi. Crane has much better relations with his deceased forerunners. They shake off any aura of doom. Even the failures are memorable, explorers, adventurers, artists. Crane summons them and stands by their side with the same ease with which he joined in dancing alongside Maquoketa. In the second six poems in the Bridge after Crane has returned from the dream quest of the first six, where explorers and adventurers were on call. He turns for help to American artists, some of whom in the 1920s were still controversial. He requires these artistic predecessors, now that he is in pedestrian mode, walking about the city, to glimpse within strangers, ordinary workers, figures caught in their everyday lives, a capacity for transformation and renewal that Crane had found when he was in his dreaming. This crew of artists that answers Crane's call is alarmingly diverse. Whitman's okay, but then Poe? Dickinson indeed, but there's also Isadora Duncan. Yet such heterogeneity is entirely appropriate. Three Songs, the section where Crane engages with strangers, features three distinct figures who each make themselves over within the limitations of the work site they occupy in their own way. To see himself in these others, to grasp why the frivolous lyrics of pop tune may be helpful to the wistful Mary in Virginia, a secretary longing for romance, requires empathy that is empowered by diversity. Crane's motley crew offers not random qualities, but makes available a trove of abundance. The sexual anxiety that Eliot confronts is among the boldest of his maneuvers.. It's especially striking in that the London in The Wasteland is populated by people who travel in the same circles. They run into each other on the street. They agree on who is the finest clairvoyant, and they can follow an ongoing conversation in the local pub. Eliot's Tiresian side is enabled by this familiarity. So he's even more courageous when he includes in his poem a side of sexuality that he may also know. Recalling the sexual violence of rape in the Myth of Philomel. Compulsively returned to it at several points in the poem, or spelling out in ugly detail a predatory sexuality ,that leverages asymmetrical power, a clerk's visit to a secretary ends in casual sex. Or portraying discarded women as surviving, as speaking in their own words, and repurposing the sonnet, originally a form that was a souvenir of romantic love. These moments redefine sacrifice and suffering and they are where Elliot is not only up to date, but demonstrating the power of confronting that which is taboo. What courage he musters in the quest of this final section follows from understanding these examples by women. Crane is in a different position. As a gay male in the 1920s, even in a city as accepting as New York, he cannot be wholly expressive. At the same time a certain sensitivity, in reading body language, is one preparation for regarding others as performing their roles intricately, complexly, and allusively. Crane expects the old sailor he meets in a dive bar in Cutty Sark to be an embodiment of Maquoketa. But their encounter collapses and he leaves for home walking over the bridge. When he is granted a magical view of a phantom regatta of clipper ships on the East River, it is clear that the sailors presence had the power to go beyond what Crane had anticipated. It transferred to Crane this imagery of the sailor's youthful adventuring, bringing to the pedestrian world a flash of the associational logic of the dream. But these elements and others of same sex encounters are conspicuously downplayed and indeed, it is only since the 1990s and groundbreaking work by Thomas Yingling and others, that we possess a chance to see such material in the corners of Crane's text. These differences between Eliott and Crane establish a polarity broad enough that the modernist cultural epic has ample space to develop. One of the more interesting aspects of this set of contraries is that Crane himself was sharply aware of Eliott. Not so much as an adversary, but as a negative influence, as inhabiting a sensibility Crane could understand, but wanted to press back against. He rages this press back in the Tunnel, the next to last poem of the Bridge over which he and Elliott interact as voices both in the lines of the poem, and as public figures who are developing positions. Crane is the poet defining Eliot's territory. And Eliot is the editor of a major journal, inviting Crane's definitions into the pages he controls. [MUSIC]
