Between Poetic Voice and Silence: Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Metapoetics and Emily Dickinson’s Legacy

Alicja Piechucka

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.10.19

Authors

Alicja Piechucka University of Lodz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7522-7195

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.19

Keywords:

Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Emily Dickinson, metapoetics, silence, gender

Abstract

The article is a comparative study of the ways in which two American modernist poets bound by a literary and human connection, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, dealt with Emily Dickinson’s legacy in their own works. My study is an attempt to place Crane within the legacy of the American Renaissance as represented not by Walt Whitman, with whom he is customarily associated, but by Dickinson, and to examine the special place she holds in Crane’s poetry and in his thinking about poetry and the world at large. Crane’s poetic take on the Amherst poet is set against and complemented by his friend Yvor Winters’s ambiguous relationship with Dickinson’s heritage: troubled by an anxiety of influence, Winters, the poet-critic, vacillates between his reverence for the female poet and his skepticism about certain aspects of her œuvre. In the close readings of the poems in question undertaken in my study, the focus is on their metapoetic dimension. Particular emphasis is laid on the dialectics of silence, which plays a key role in both Crane’s and Winters’s works under discussion, as well as on the related themes of blankness and absence, poetic plenitude and perfection. Attention is also given to the problematics of death, time and timelessness. While Winters concentrates mostly on metapoetics in his exploration of the Dickinsonian tradition, Crane goes further, considering the fate of female artists and gender issues, thereby transcending poetic self-reflexiveness and addressing farther-reaching community concerns, with particular emphasis on anti-patriarchal and feminist ones.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Alicja Piechucka, University of Lodz

Alicja Piechucka works in the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz. She received her PhD in American literature from the University of Lodz in 2006. Her doctoral thesis was on T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Her postdoctoral research focused mostly on Hart Crane’s oeuvre. She obtained her habilitation in 2020. Her academic interests include American modernist poetry and contemporary American prose. Much of her research centers on comparative studies of American and French literature.

References

Benfey, Christopher. “Emily Dickinson and the American South.” The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 30–50. Print. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521806445.003 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521806445.003

Bennett, Paula. Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1990. Print.

Berthoff, Warner. Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Print.

Brunner, Edward J. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of “The Bridge.” Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. Print.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (1976): 875–93. Print. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/493306

Combs, Robert. Vision of the Voyage: Hart Crane and the Psychology of Romanticism. Memphis: Memphis State UP, 1978. Print.

Crane, Hart. Complete Poems and Selected Letters. New York: The Library of America, 2006. Print.

Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Ed. Cristanne Miller. N.p.: Harvard UP, 2016. Print. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674968752 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674968752

Edelman, Lee. Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. Print.

Erkkila, Betsy. “The Emily Dickinson Wars.” The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 11–29. Print. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521806445.002 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521806445.002

Farr, Judith. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674036727

Fisher, Clive. Hart Crane: A Life. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1ww3vh2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1ww3vh2

Freudenthal, Gideon. Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton: On the Genesis of the Mechanistic World View. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986. Print. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4500-5 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4500-5

Hammer, Langdon. Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Hazo, Samuel. Hart Crane: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963. Print.

Irwin, John T. Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Print.

Lewis, R. W. B. The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. Print. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400878482

Makaryk, Irena R. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442674417 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442674417

Parkinson, Thomas, ed. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Print. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520323766

Piechucka, Alicja. “Art (and) Criticism: Hart Crane and David Siqueiros.” Text Matters 8 (2018): 229–43. Print. https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2018-0014 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2018-0014

Piechucka, Alicja. “Black Suns of Melancholy: Hart Crane’s Treatment of the Sun Motif in the Light of Mircea Eliade’s Study of Solar Cults.” European Journal of American Studies 8.1 (Spring 2013): n.pag. Online article. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.9946 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.9946

Piechucka, Alicja. “The Sound of Silence: Saint Cecilia and Celestial Music in Hart Crane and Stéphane Mallarmé.” Polish Journal for American Studies 10 (2016): 23–36. Print.

Reed, Brian M. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 2006. Print.

Tapper, Gordon A. The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Wargacki, John P. “Reduction and Negation in Emily Dickinson’s ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ and Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man.’” The Explicator 69.2 (2011): 90–99. Print. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2011.620542 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2011.620542

Winters, Yvor. Collected Poems. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1952. Print.

Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1947. Print.

Yingling, Thomas E. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1990. Print.