T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane in Matters of Style

Abstract

The writing style of Hart Crane has embarked on Symbolism that French Symbolists had developed in the nineteenth century and that modern English poets, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, found as a new poetic form in the early twentieth century. In the nineteen-twenties, Crane had felt the strong power of Eliot’s poetic skills which brought English aesthetic styles in his early poetic life from the French poets, such as Arthur Rimbaud or Jules Laforgue. Hence, it is interestingly remarkable to see Eliot’s objective, impersonal stance leading the literary tendency of the nineteen-twenties in view of French poets and Crane’s different goal in style. Obviously, in reaction to Eliot’s negative attitudes to human characters as seen in The Waste Land, Crane’s different style developed further with the conventional symbols, Faustus and Helen, which yet function to associate his imagination with the agreeable life of New Yorkers the speaker sympathetically talks about in the first long poem, “Faustus and Helen.”In a matter of style, Crane, away from Eliot’s perspective of poetry, opened the way to another convention in poetry: Symbolism in a historical sense. Unlike Edmund Wilson who confined French Symbolism within modern poetry, Northrop Frye widely connected Symbolism to the whole history of literature, revealing it as a proper term to interpret its meaning. In the nineteen-twenties, Eliot, discrediting romantic sensibility, engaged thoroughly in synthesizing the complex literary movements, French Symbolism and English classic aestheticism, into religio-philosophical directions for years to come. Yet, Crane tried to reconcile the romantically spirited French Symbolism and Coleridgean imagination within his poetic style relying more on romantically spirited personality. Unfortunately, Crane stopped his poetic life when only thirty-three years old, allegedly buried by the prominent movement, a contemporary Classicism of Eliot.