0.1 Afterword

Ii

When Crane was writing his poems and showing them to friends and acquaintances, the responses were as split as they would be when the book was released to thereviewers. “There was clash and clang of spear and shield” of admirers and detractors, an understandable result given the deliberately arresting character of the texts, on the one hand, and oftheir graphical presentation on the other. Indeed, Copeland and Day’s design represents the first public act of interpretation that Crane’s “lines” received.

The design’s chief move was to give an abstract inflection to the texts, as if they were not to be read asthe works of a poet but as a set of quasi-absolute, prophetic inscriptions. The signature lines that open the book are entirely characteristic:

black riders came from the sea.

there was clash and clang of spear and shield,

and clash and clang of hoof and heel,

wild shouts and the wave of hair

in the rush upon the wind:

thus the ride of sin.

By calling attention to itself as a textual presence (ratherthan a vehicle of linguistic reference), the typography turns the lines back into themselves, leading one to identify the “ black riders ” with their immediate typographical unfolding. This move simultaneously evacuates the texts of the subjectivity that poetry, particularly romantic poetry,commonly asks the reader to expect. The effect is particularly forceful because this initial text avoids an explicit first-person grammar.

When such a grammar is finally invoked—in numbers III and IV—we observe the subjective poet begin to disappear into his formsof expression. This process is first signaled in number II, when we meet a line of “ three little birds in a row. ” These are plainly figured as symbolic of poetic expression—they “sat musing” —and they come here to laugh at a third-person poet who “ thinks he can sing .” In this case, the text brings an ironic self-reference to the presumed poet of this book we are reading. Why the birds laugh at the poet isleft unexplained. But the point is not to evoke a confounding mystery, it is to construct a sign to index Crane’s emerging argument for a new conception of “the poet,” who is being visibly dissociatedhere from the conventional signs of voice and song.

The argument is moved along in numbers III and IV, where a first person is introduced: “ in the desert/ i saw a creature, naked bestial ” (III). Because the scene is allegorically generalized, this first person turns to a kind of Everyman, an effect reinforced by the balladic form of the lines, which present alittle dramatic encounter between the “I” and the “ creature. ” From this point the first-person grammar will be dislocated from its usual association with the first person of the quotidian author. The “I”enters a kind of cosmic space where it encounters various transhuman beings, powers, and dominions:

i stood upon a high place,

and saw, below, many devils (IX)

a learned man came to me once.

he said, “i know the way,—come.” (XX)