[MUSIC] The bridge appeared as the 1920's closed, when the extravagant text of experimental modernism were about to be shouldered to side by socially aware writings of the popular front. This documentary testaments would define the 1930's. And in their wake, Crane's poem was regarded as an outlier, caught between seismic shifts in literary taste. But recent responses to The Bridge recognize the transitional role it may play in moving between two very different decades. If it exemplifies the experimental mode of the 1920s, it also anticipates the social awareness of the 1930s. These are two talks in which Rukeyser's first two books are under discussion. The first takes up poems on the city and the machine that appeared in Theory of Flight 1935. And the second considers Muriel Rukeyser's, The Book of the Dead from her next book, U.S. 1., 1938. Especially this Book of the Dead will take elements from the cultural epic that Elliott and Crane, among others, had been developing, shifting them in the direction that's directly engaged with social problems and political issues. Just as the trade addition of the bridge was going to press in 1930, Crane was finishing an essay on modern poetry for a collection entitled Revolt in the Arts. His appearance in that collection elevated his reputation for modernist poet to authoritative pundit. Modern poetry, the essay, would appear alongside others titled The newspaper is literature. Radio as an independent art. On behalf of the silent film, form and color in the home, and the composure in the machine age. Crane had fallen among the celebrities. Spokesperson and notables who could speak definitively about their special feels. Haywood Broun wrote the essay on the newspaper, George Gershwin the essay on the Seeing Age Composition, and even Lilian Gish, or someone writing for Lilian Gish, talked on the silent film. If this was a celebrity list though, these figures defended modern art as a commons that welcomed many practices. As The Collectors editor, Oliver Saylor, explained, what had begun as a symposium on modern theater had quickly expanded into a survey on the field of arts as a whole. Because the arts now formed an intricate network of busy canals in close contact with our daily lives. Revolt in the arts was tied directly to technological change. This revolt, Sailer said, had no leaders. Its upheavals were byproducts of innovative technologies, whose significance in the way they transmitted art, was still in the process of being determined. Crane's interest in transit systems, as they stretched across generations of time, from the canoe to the clipper, to the express to the airplane, governed his essay. In his essay, at least, Crane understands that figures become celebrities by describing problems for which they have an answer. He thus called for ways to explore how machine technology can act creatively in our lives, until the unconscious nervous responses of our bodies, it's connotations emanate from within. Despite this interest in the machine, Crane's confident prediction was that art would triumph. Machinery will tend to lose it's sensational glamour and appear in it's true subsidiary order in human life. As use and continual illusions subdue its novelty. No one confronted this problem of the machine as seriously and intensely as Muriel Rukeyser in her first book, Theory of Flight, where it proved to be a far more demanding project. Than Crane's optimism makes evident. It was a startling choice, for the ordinarily traditional Yale Younger Poets series in 1935. Stephen Vincent Benét was the judge, author of a best-selling narrative poem about the Civil War. Theory of Light was still startling in 2010 when contemporary poet George Bradley was editing an anthology collecting excerpts from that series. Aggressive, impatient and unafraid to be difficult, Bradley wrote. Her poems up to the minute in style adding that nothing else that has been published in the Yale series up to that point was even remotely like her book. She enters, kicking down the door. The book took its name, Theory of Flight, from the title of the manual Rukeyser used when taking the ground course at the Roosevelt School of Aviation. She did not qualify for flight training because her parents would not sign a release permitting a minor to fly. Aeronautical technology, flight design, and journeys by airplane are not just referenced in this volume, they are a source of metaphors, the basis for setting, and origin of conflicts. For her the airplane was an instrument for political, sexual, and poetic liberation in Liza word. In contrast of masculinity and militarism it represented at the time. Conceiving the airplane is much more than the most recent avatar of the machine. Rukeyser exceeds Crane's ambitions. He expressed in the bridge shock at aerial warfare in Cape Hatteras. She has a poem entitled Night flight New York City. But, if her language stretches to accommodate expanded meanings, the language she is stretching was originally Crane's. Her articulate translation of machine images into poetry, Horace Gregory saw in a 1936 review, was a logical development of the technique that was brilliantly exhibited in the poetry of Crane. The sprawling title work, a multi sequence poem that threaded with politics and includes Strikes Among Coal Miners The trial of the Scottsboro nine and a visit to Da Vinci's studio has been likened to the bridge by Rukeyser scholar Louise Cortez. But the poems that are set in New York are the most recent work in theory of flight and they build thoughtfully on Crane as a precedent. Rukeyser's New York is in every way faster, hotter, and fiercer than anything in crane. It's pace is exhilarating, but it is also exhausting. For her, the trucks rumbling along the city streets are more native, more natural prelude today than the lark at heaven's gate, Louis Untermeyer wrote, including her as the most recent poet to be discovered in his 1943 edition of New Poets of America. The airplane is a more legitimate, if more ominous symbol of man's longing for Freedom then fluttering psyche's butterflies and picturesquely release doves. Excerpted a segment from Theory of Flight and reprinted it as Ceiling Unlimited. A title that borrows a technical term describing weather conditions to pilots. The poem is structured as a ballad down to its long lines designed to carry narrative information. Its occasional mid-line pause that asserts a connection to Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. And its use of a refrain as a commentary. The refrain offers fragments from an official weather channel. Like Gale's from the Northwest, tomorrow rain. Wind velocity changing from 19 to 30. Information who's dry accuracy is personally valuable to the couple rising in the morning. He's a pilot scheduled for a commercial flight She is six months pregnant with their first child. Pregnant mothers discussing their child's future with it's father are so rare in modern poetry, it has to be an endangered species. And as the conversation between the two continues, to confirm their closeness, the dangers that always lurk in ballad narratives deepen. Pilots cannot be heroic, he tells her. There are no heroes to withstand wind or a loose bolt or a tank empty of gas. After he hurries to the airport, she wants to deny the dangers. She does not imagine how the propeller turns in a blinding speed. The time for his return arrives and passes. She watches evening advance. She knows the child's stirring. She knows night. She knows he will not come. The poem ends with the same refrain that closed the first stanza. Ceiling unlimited, visibility unlimited. In the morning these words pointed to endless possibility. In the evening they record an unbearable emptiness. The ballad is updated and crisscrossed with airplane lore but its brilliance is that it conveys an ancient story of loss, reversal, and a broken generation a child without a father. Rukeyser's urban poems are not always so clear, but they suggest how danger is unavoidably present. In Night Flight New York, Rukeyser find's speed crushing the stars upon us, stretching the accordion of our lives. A description that brings the stars close, collapsing distance as speed tends to do. But it stretches lives as if they could easily be expanded. Will we succeed in acclimating the machine or will the machine acclimate us? Eccentric motion begins, dashing in glass we race, New York to Washington. Writers dashing between giant cities are stylish, fashionable in their dashing mode. But doesn't the machine wear the riders instead of the riders the machine? Upholstered promenades convey us far. Have we reached the last limits? What do we not know? Surely the rider should know. So often is speed invoked as a presence in these poems that it becomes a norm. But it's a norm that no one can take shelter in. As in Rukeyser's study in a late subway. Speed welcomes us to explosions of light. Here is wrath and fortitude and motion of burning. Here echoes of Crane's subway appear along with, as in the reference to wrath echoes of Crane's echoing wake. So ferocious is Rukeyser's Subway that its writers are reduced to faces that barely catch up with what hurls them along. Beaten from streams of metal and secret earth, energy travels along the veins of steel, their faces rush forward. Rukeyser's poem Burlesque also spells out as Crane did in National Winter Garden the barely suppressed violence that a dancer who wears disarray clothing. Stained by the shifting light to blue the pearl scarf shimmer's at her hips and who's eroticism is being assaulted. The appealing flesh is whipped in tier ambushed in spasms. Once, there were breakthrough concepts that were designed to expand our lives, but these now, in the gyroscope, present disturbing questions. Centrifical power, expanding universe, within expanding universe. What stillnesses lie at your center, resting among motion. Modern poets and cities have worked well together ever since boat layers example and flowers of evil. But Crane and Rukeyser were working in Baudelaire's steps differ from earlier modernists who portrayed the threat of the city as it's anonymity. In Chicago poems 1916 Carl Sandburg kept forcing us to see or hear those urban dwellers who kept to the shadows. This is a six line poem titled, Subway. Down between the walls of shadow where the iron laws insist, the hunger voices mock. The worn wayfaring men with the hunched and humbled shoulders Throw their laughter into toil. The poem's strength is sprung in its last line. The emphasize falls on the verb that launches the line. Throw their laughter into toil. In the wall of shadow only hunger voices can be heard but the laughing they escape from their invisibility being hunched and humble though the voices have croned As identical to the work effort and they passing to a Bolivia in almost at once to throw is the toast away. This first stake excuse for prose, mostly descriptive with modest that striking adjectives iron laws, hungry voices. Though the flatness of this writing might have been throwing in 1916. That flatness of lines with men who can't be seen and are barely heard. My understanding that the city at least in New York in boom times is rolling with energy. Crane reconceptualize the strain of urban living along the lines of stress not anonymity. The people Crane views are strangers. All of whom seem absorbed in various procedures. Even the disoriented sailor is focused on trying to remember. The problem that matters, then, occurs around issues of tolerance and acceptance. How do we appreciate those who's difference from us is so larger, even larger than life? Cranes language bends, twists, yaws, and somersaults In an effort to respond to the figures in his three songs who might be misunderstood as debased versions of figures from the great past but who now require idiosyncratic and innovative expressions in order for them to be regarded as they want to see themselves. Rukeyser has a similar insistence on portraying New Yorkers endlessly on the go. The poem that begins with racing from New York to Washington ends with racing from New York to Mexico. She extends that portrait to urban dwellers with an appropriate increase in pace. As complex as her language is, we need to press all the way through the sentence, because not until it has ended can we begin to follow it. Lines with considerable density move along rapidly, then like heavy airplanes that none the less soar. The city becomes rife with activity. Endlessly active. An immense challenge. A tableau that summons its inhabitants to action equipping them to bring about the kind of social change that Rukeyser will show the 30s will ask from everyone. [MUSIC]
