Machines to Live In

Modernism has a particular meaning in the context of architecture: Loos’s and Le Corbusier’s war on ornament; plain white buildings with massive windows. One enormous problem with modern-movement buildings is that they typically refuse to engage with time at all—as well as being a conscious break with the past, they tend to be strangely unable to envisage a future. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Scott’s 1914 The Architecture of Humanism was a reassessment of baroque architecture which attempted a non-moralized way of judging architectural merit, and there were also modernist architects whose work had elements of the playful, surprising, deceitful, camp, or surreal. Lutyens, Oliver Hill, and Raymond McGrath are considered in this light.

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

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.

Apprentices to Chance Event

This chapter explores representations of career in Harmonium (Wallace Stevens), Observations (Marianne Moore), and White Buildings (Hart Crane) that resist the normative course of development that underpins the professional ideal of regular production. The indeterminacy of representations of career in nineteenth-century poetry is pressed to an extreme in modernist debuts, which are burdened not only with evoking the uncertainty that confirms vocational integrity and the intermittency that signals autonomy from the market, but also with evoking those ideas in new ways. This last challenge, necessitated by the demand that every artistic generation make it new, is made still more daunting by the rise of a culture of professionalism in which writing poetry was apt to appear as childish, effeminate, escapist, elitist, and generally absurd.

Christian Tears; Pagan Smiles: Hart Crane’s “Lachrymae Christi”

When American poet Hart Crane declares in a letter, “I felt the two worlds. And at once,” he speaks bluntly of the governing tension of his poetry: the knocking of Harold Hart Crane’s finite language against the hard, transparent ceiling beyond which he senses the divine. Crane’s first collection, White Buildings, often shows signs of visionary frustration. But in “Lachrymae Christi,” the most difficult poem in White Buildings, Crane’s vision dilates to immense possibilities of union between the material and the spirit worlds, between what is time-bound and what is timeless. This poem, both its poetic effect and its spiritual purpose, can be most sympathetically read as mystical. Because the tonal movement toward rapture in “Lachrymae Christi” resonates against the poetry and theology of Renaissance mystics such as St. John of the Cross, we can situate the poem in the context of ancient patterns of western mysticism in order to reclaim what has long been seen as an opaque and elusive poem. “Lachrymae Christi” rewards this reading of its mystical poetics with line after line of quivering wordplay, startlingly fresh religious allusion, and subtle thematic polyphony as it interweaves Christian and pagan traditions of regeneration.