Graduate Opacities of the Evening

Sat, Dec 9, 2006

J. C. Powys appreciated Hart Crane’s “For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen” (Hart Crane, LOA 338), and Crane was also consoled by the vigorous style of Lewis’s Time and Western Man, a “lot better than the usual Doug Fairbanks of controversies” (575). I could see “There is a world dimensional/For those untwisted by the love of things/Irreconcilable” as an epigraph for A Glastonbury Romance.

Also, well known, but worth repeating is Crane’s judgement that “Rimbaud is the last great poet that our civilization will see” (467). That last terrible letter, “am going back to Cleveland to help in the business crisis, " reeks of metempsychotic anticipation: legless, enchanting a devout younger sister with fairy tales, proprioceptive phantoms.