University City to New Orleans (via Iowa City): Academic Blues versus ‘American Blues’

Abstract

In an entry in his notebook for 26 May 1936, Williams entered his thoughts about reading Hart Crane:

I feel plumb stupid tonight. I’ve been reading a lot of Hart Crane’s poetry — like it but hardly understand a single line — of course the individual lines aren’t supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect — much of it has at least the atmosphere of great poetry — it is a lot of raw material, all significant and moving but not chiselled into any communicative shape.¹

The poet and the year are significant here for several reasons. The most obvious one is the life-long influence that Hart Crane had on Williams, begun here in 1936, the year that his own literary aesthetics, under the watchful eye of Clark Mills, began taking shape. But if he was now, on the doorstep of discovering a whole new literary world at Washington University, moving away from the Romantics and toward the Modernists in theory, in practice his aesthetics were still a century in the past. Critics, scholars, and theatre historians of Williams over the years have, of course, shed extensive light on Crane’s importance to Williams’s literary life, and there is no reason to doubt that here.