“THE SILKEN SKILLED TRANSMEMBERMENT OF SONG”: HART CRANE’S “VOYAGES”

Abstract

One of the crucial figures of American Modernist poetry, Hart Crane (1899–1932) is notorious for baffling both readers and critics with his nearly impenetrable rhetoric. The paper focuses on “Voyages”, a sextet of poems from the poet’s first collection, White Buildings (1926), aiming to prove that his so-called obscurity is often a result of a rather simplistic approach to poetry analysis, where the sound of the verses is dismissed in favour of a purely semantic analysis. Using some of the more recent criticism of Crane’s work, such as Reed’s and Tapper’s studies, the author argues that “Voyages” can be interpreted as a cyclical poetic rumination on the nature of love and poetry, dominated by the motif of the sea. Special attention is paid to the intertextual reading, wherein Crane’s poem is put firmly within the context of traditional love poetry by the authors such as Donne, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman and Rimbaud, with the last two poets providing another context, that of queer love poetry.

Keywords

• American poetry, Hart Crane, homoeroticism, love poetry, “Voyages”