When Hart Crane’s poem cycle The Bridge was published in 1930, a group of influential reviewers accused Crane of immaturity, sentimentality, and lack of focus. They condemned Crane’s wayward, fuzzy mysticism as backwards-looking and self-defeating. Even sympathetic critics, such as Harold Bloom, have consistently portrayed Crane’s poetry as the pyrotechnic final fizzle of late romanticism. These persistent, public reservations, however, have not prevented an impressive proliferation in secondary literature concerning Crane since the late 1960s. His promiscuity, alcoholism, erratic behavior, relative poverty, tragic death, and total commitment to art have since earned him the labels of New World Rimbaud and proto-Beat. His colorful career thus explains in part his retrospective fame. Nevertheless, living hard and dying young do not guarantee artistic immortality. This article poses questions as to why Crane has mattered so much to subsequent generations of U.S. readers and what these readers find so compelling in his poetry. The answer, I would argue, lies in Crane’s idiosyncratic use of language. Far from striving for transparency, he writes in an inimitably obstructive, artificial manner. There is something seductive and absurd in his wild use of words here, I would further argue, we discover the reason behind both Crane’s enduring appeal and his supposed inadequacy as a writer. Crane did “torture” syntax, semantics, and conventional associations, not because he saw his unusual language as an eccentric mannerism but because he saw it as a tool in the service of constructing a “myth of America” and reintegrating the human and divine. Understanding why he considered this to be the case clarifies Crane’s achievement and illuminates why his work still seems so relevant today.
목차
I Ⅱ Ⅲ Ⅳ Works Cited [Abstract]
키워드
modernist poetrypoetic languagepoeticsAmerican poetryAmerican literature 1900-1999“The Bridge”“Cape Hatteras”
국제언어인문학회 [INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES IN LANGUAGE]
설립연도
2000
분야
인문학>언어학
소개
국제언어인문학회는 '언어를 통한 인문학 연구'의 필요성에 동감하는 여러 전공분야 학자들의 뜻을 담고 있습니다. 언어에 초점을 맞추는 것은, 다양한 전공분야의 참여에서 생겨날 수 있는 '이질적 집합'의 상황을 극복하기 위한 장치입니다. 현재로서는 작은 불씨를 지핀 것에 불과합니다. 그러나 이렇게 일구어진 불꽃이 새로운 학풍의 바람결에 커다란 섬광으로 빛나게 될 날이 올 것을 우리는 확신합니다. 우리의 학회와 학술지는 인문학 불변의 가치와 시대적 사명을 인식하는 국내외의 학자들을 향해 활짝 개방되어 있습니다. 특정 전공의 범위를 넘어서서 철학, 문학, 언어학, 종교, 역사, 문화, 예술 등의 시각에서 언어의 본질을 토론할 기회가 될 것입니다.