Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

In today’s poem, written a century ago, cinema (and Charlie Chaplin) is already supplying metaphors for the work and experience of modern poets. Happy reading.

Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.

His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.

Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, July 10th, 2004. Today's poem comes from Hart Crane, the late romantic modernist poet of the early 20th century, who's best remembered for his epic poem, The Bridge. And his poem today
0:23.2	continues our trip to the movies this week. It's called Chaplinesque. And I make no apology for a
0:30.8	second poem inspired by Charlie Chaplin. As I said earlier in the week, if you think or talk about movies long enough,
0:39.9	you are inevitably going to bump up against this seminal figure, especially his unforgettable creation, The Tramp.
0:49.2	I will read the poem once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.
0:56.0	Chaplainesque.
0:58.6	We make our meek adjustments contented with such random consolations as the wind deposits
1:04.9	in slithered in two ample pockets.
1:07.9	For we can still love the world, who find a famished kitten on the step and no recesses
1:14.0	for it from the fury of the street or warm, torn elbow coverts. We will sidestep, and to the final
1:21.5	smirk, dally the doom of that inevitable thumb that slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, facing the dull squint with what
1:30.9	innocence and what surprise. And yet these fine collapses are not lies more than the pirouettes of any
1:38.8	pliant cane. Our obsequies are in a way no enterprise. We can evade you and all else but the heart.
1:48.3	What blame to us if the heart live on? The game enforces smirks, but we have seen the moon in lonely
1:56.0	alleys make a grail of laughter of an empty ash can. And through all sound of gaiety and quest,
2:03.4	have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
2:14.1	So in this poem,
2:16.8	Heart Crane seems to imagine he uses the we, plural first person pronoun,
2:24.3	and seems to imagine that Chaplin's Tramp character, again, is a kind of stand-in for the poet. At this time, perhaps, particularly at this time,
2:41.4	the task of the poet was one up for debate. The fate of poetry and the reputation of poets
2:50.7	seems to wax and wane throughout history.
2:54.0	Crane was clearly living in a moment where he felt that the work of poets was something that
	...

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